Sarah Orne Jewett: The Tory Lover (1901)

[Image source: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/51537/pg51537-images.html#the-parting-feast . Illustration by Charles Herbert Woodbury for the 1901 book edition of The Tory Lover.]

Just before nightfall, that same day, two travel-worn men came riding along a country road toward Old Passage, the ancient ferrying-place where travelers from the south and west of England might cross over into Wales. From an immemorial stream of travel and the wear of weather, the road-bed was worn, like a swift stream's channel, deep below the level of the country. One of the riders kept glancing timidly at the bushy banks above his head, as if he feared to see a soldier in the thicket peering down; his companion sat straight in his saddle, and took no notice of anything but his horse and the slippery road. It had been showery all the afternoon, and they were both spattered with mud from cap to stirrup.

As they came northward, side by side, to the top of a little hill, the anxious rider gave a sigh of relief, and his horse, which limped badly and bore the marks of having been on his knees, whinnied as if in sympathy. The wide gray waters of the Severn were spread to east and west; the headland before them fell off like a cliff. Below, to the westward, the land was edged by a long line of dike which walled the sea floods away from some low meadows that stretched far along the coast. Over the water were drifting low clouds of fog and rain, but there was a dull gleam of red on the western sky like a winter sunset, and the wind was blowing. At the road's end, just before them, was a group of gray stone buildings perched on the high headland above the Severn, like a monastery or place of military defense.

As the travelers rode up to the Passage Inn, the inn yard, with all its stables and outhouses, looked deserted; the sunset gust struck a last whip of rain at the tired men. The taller of the two called impatiently for a hostler before he got stiffly to the ground, and stamped his feet as he stood by his horse. It was a poor tired country nag, with a kind eye, that began to seek some fondling from her rider, as if she harbored no ill will in spite of hardships. The young man patted and stroked the poor creature, which presently dropped her head low, and steamed, as if it were winter weather, high into the cool air.

(From The Tory Lover, Ch 42)

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I didn't mean to say so much without saying more, now I have touched you with cold water when I only meant just lightly & kindly to sprinkle you as for a new baptism -- that is a re-dedication to altars but briefly, I trust, forsaken. Go back to the dear Country of the Pointed Firs, come back to the palpable present intimate that throbs responsive, & that wants, misses, needs you, God knows, & that suffers woefully in your absence.

Thus wrote Henry James to Sarah Orne Jewett on 5 October 1901, concluding his onslaught on historical fiction with a touch of compunction. 

Well, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), lightly fictionalized vignettes of Maine provincial life, -- this description hardly prepares you for what a wonderful book it is. But The Tory Lover, the book James deplored, is rather wonderful too, in its way. (It helps if you relish historical novels; James was clearly allergic to them.)

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I must admit I do. I enjoy the most conventional aspects of Jewett's transatlantic romance as much as all the rest. I can idle away a whole morning on the Ranger (e.g. Ch 12), for instance  -- there is a complaining sailor called Starbuck on Paul Jones' ship -- so I read about the Starbuck surname and its Nantucket connections and how it came to be attached to the overpriced coffee chain where I spend too much time (but usually drinking tea... I wonder yet again why Starbucks doesn't offer a cortado...) or -- Paul Jones decides to dole out a ration of grog to the crew -- so I go off and read about the history of the naval rum ration. At the same time I'm thinking of how intimately Jewett understood sailing and boats and ships, both from her Maine background and from her constant travels; she and Annie Adams Fields had crossed the Atlantic eight times. 

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NB for British readers: in the context of the American War of Independence, a "Tory" was a Loyalist, i.e. an American who still supported British sovereignty; in contrast with the Patriots (sometimes called "Whigs") who fought for Independence. 

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Reading Jewett's books tends to provoke that kind of conviction: that she knows what she's talking about. Especially of course her Maine writings. And yet it wasn't always that simple. 

After we returned to the parlor Mr. James took occasion to tell Sarah how deeply and sincerely he appreciates her work; how he re-reads it with increasing admiration. "It is foolish to ask, I know," he said, "but were you in just such a place as you describe in the 'Pointed Firs'? --" "No," she said, "not precisely; the book was chiefly written before I visited the locality itself --" "And such an island?" he continued. "Not exactly," she said again. "Ah! I thought so," he said musingly; "and the language -- It is so absolutely true -- not a word overdone -- such elegance and exactness."

[from Annie Fields' diary, 12 September 1898.]

Jewett was in fact a master at creating the conviction of local knowledge even when she didn't have it; like Kipling, who greatly admired her writings.

Later in the novel the scene shifts to England, and it was then that I had my own moment of conviction,  while I was reading the scene in which our heroine Mary Hamilton accompanies the elderly Mr Davis on a ride from Bristol to Bath along the Avon valley, countryside that I know very well. 

The fields and hedges, the bright foxglove and green ivy, the larks and blackbirds and quiet robins, the soft air against her cheeks, .....   this hazy landscape along the Avon... "You may see Bath now, there in the valley," said Mr. Davis, pointing with his big hand and the hunting crop. "'T is as fine a ride from Bristol to Bath as any you may have in England." They stopped their horses, a little short of breath, and looked down the rich wooded country to the bright town below.

(From The Tory Lover, Ch 35)

She had to have been there! I found myself thinking. It was not because of the presence of any unusual fact, it was somehow the understanding of the topography and its proportions, the hazy Avon, the mild climate, Bath in its rather steep valley; things you can't easily convey in a guidebook, but instantly grasp when you go there. 

I didn't know much about Jewett's European travels at that point. Later, I did some research (see below); and sure enough, in July 1892 she had indeed spent a few days in Bristol, or rather Westbury on Trym (still not quite swallowed up). The Egyptologist Amelia Edwards had lived at "The Larches" until her recent death. Jewett had become friends with Miss Edwards and her assistant Kate Bradbury during their 1889 lecture tour. Now Kate was trying to sort out what to do about the house contents, in particular the important library. 

Kate was very busy, but Jewett was an energetic sightseer. She would certainly have taken herself up to nearby Clifton Down and from there down to Bristol cathedral (the setting for an important scene in The Tory Lover). She could conceivably have taken a trip to Bath .... but then I thought of something. She must have arrived by train from Paddington, so she would already have passed through Bath and the Avon valley on her way to Bristol. Pleasant as it is to imagine Sarah Orne Jewett traversing this July landscape on horseback like Mary Hamilton, it's most likely that she just looked out of a train window. Her glance could take in everything, and then bring it forth eight years later when she needed it for her historical romance. 

She wasn't planning The Tory Lover then, as far as we know.  But by the time she returned to Europe in 1898, she certainly was. And a pattern emerges. In the novel, Paul Jones and Lieutenant Wallingford travel from Nantes via Vitré to Paris. Jewett herself, researching the locations, was staying in Paris; it was from here that she visited both Vitré and Nantes, in each case by train. So Jewett (unlike her model Sir Walter Scott, eighty years earlier) was using modern transportation methods -- train and passenger ship -- to whiz around France and England. Her life, once away from provincial South Berwick, assumed the hub-and-spoke shape that still characterizes the travels of the wealthy (the hubs being e.g. London or Paris). But in her imagined world of  1778, there was no rail network and her characters are shown travelling arduously cross-country between her endpoints -- by horse power (e.g. Nantes to Vitré,  Bristol to Plymouth). That single alteration, you might say, went a long way towards creating the conditions of historical romance.

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But what then of the Old Passage Inn, scene of the novel's denouement? The building still exists (it's now a private house) and Jewett's topography is remarkably accurate, as Graham Frater commented (in Terry Heller's edition, linked below); though Charles Woodbury's accompanying illustration romanticized the contours of a landscape that is really very flat. 

There was indeed a dike or sea-wall running south from Old Passage (Mary Hamilton and Mr Davis will later arrive by that route). The headland does indeed end in a cliff (Aust cliff). (This is where the Severn Bridge was constructed in the 1960s.)

Could Jewett have gone there in 1892? Well, it's possible. She was very interested in rivers and from Westbury on Trym she might have been tempted down to the shores of the Severn; she was also interested in neglected harbours, but it was about a ten mile walk to Old Passage. More likely she would have taken a carriage. Still, it doesn't seem a very probable destination when you are only in Bristol for a few days. 

The most obvious reason that a tourist would go to Old Passage would have been to take a ferry across the Severn. But after the Severn rail tunnel came into operation in 1886, the ferry service at Old Passage no longer ran. In 1892 the inn must have been disused or nearly so. (And anyway though Jewett travelled widely in Ireland and England, as well as staying in Edinburgh twice, there's no record of her ever visiting the other side of the Severn.)

If she didn't see the Old Passage Inn with her own eyes, what's the alternative? How could she know so much about its setting, how did she know (for instance) about the Welsh drovers who used the ferry and stayed at the inn? She might have seen accounts in earlier literature, but I haven't found any with that level of detail. Most likely, the information came from someone she knew, perhaps one of her many English friends. 

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There's another strange thing about the Old Passage scenes in The Tory Lover. They had to some extent been anticipated by  "A Dark Night", a story she wrote in 1895 for Bacheller, Johnson and Bacheller (a publishing syndicate): it appeared in the Philadelphia Press. 

Compare this paragraph from "A Dark Night" with the first one quoted above. 

As night was falling two mounted messengers, spattered with mud from cap to stirrup, were riding wearily along a deep, worn country lane. They were in the north part of the county of Somerset, near the waters of the Severn. The lane itself, deserted enough that night, was a great thoroughfare for those who came from the south and west to cross over into Wales. By this immemorial stream of travel and the wearing of the weather it had been worn like a swift stream's channel, deep below the level of the country. One of the riders kept glancing fearfully at the bushy banks above him, as if he expected to see a head in the thicket peering down. The other man rode straight and stern in his saddle, and took no notice of anything but his horse and the slippery road.

(from "A Dark Night", Ch 1)

In "A Dark Night" the location is obfuscated and contradictory. The two riders, explicitly said to be "riding northward", are travelling towards Bristol from an unamed town in the West of England. This is consistent with them being on the Somerset coast; that is, on the Bristol Channel. But the historic county of Somerset didn't extend to the Severn: the boundary with Gloucestershire lay further south, at the Avon. 

Nevertheless, the travellers in "A Dark Night" reach the banks of the Severn, even though this would mean that they've already gone beyond Bristol. And it's apparent from the topography that the "old Black Eagle Inn", where they shortly arrive, is based on the Old Passage Inn. Here is the headland, the dyke, the cliff and the Severn. The mistress of the inn tells the new arrivals that "She had ceased to keep the tavern since the travel had all gone, or been stolen away to the lower ferry"; a remark that makes perfect sense if this is the Old Passage at Aust, the "lower ferry" being the New Passage at Pilning. 

[This would suggest that "A Dark Night" is set in the late 18th-early 19th century, a period when the New Passage had gained the upper hand. The Old Passage recovered its primacy in the late 1820s, with two steamboats financed by the Duke of Beaufort, then gradually lost trade as the railway network spread; and in 1863 it reached New Passage. (Much later, there would be a resurrection of the Old Passage: a car ferry would ply between Aust and Beachey. It operated from 1926 until 1966.)]

The obfuscation, I suppose, seemed necessary because "A Dark  Night" (unlike The Tory Lover) portrayed the inn as a den of thieves. For the two stories, after similar openings, take very different courses. Nevertheless, both are founded on a common image, comprising e.g. the two travel-stained horsemen, the rainy weather, nightfall, the sunken lane, the Severn scenery of Old Passage, the unfriendly-looking inn, stabling the horses, the fishing-boat by the shore, and various other details.

I feel it's right to understand this as a pre-existent image, because in both stories Jewett sought to preserve elements that were not strictly necessary. In  "A Dark Night", as we've seen, Jewett retained the scenery of Old Passage even though the story purports to take place elsewhere. Likewise in The Tory Lover she preserved the second rider (the anxious one) who accompanies the straight-backed hero, though Hammet (in The Tory Lover) has no such important role as his predecessor Rogers. She also preserved the red sunset and the steaming horse, details natural to the winter setting of "A Dark Night" but which  have to be tagged as "like winter" in The Tory Lover, where it's in fact late summer. (Not that bad weather on the Severn at the end of July is by any means unusual.)

The buildings at Old Passage, Aust

[Image source: https://collections.bristolmuseums.org.uk/collections/2c1f3640-9461-3962-b253-0056c7eddd41/ . Drawing by Hugh O'Neill (1784 - 1824). (c)Bristol Museums, Galleries and Archives.]

From A New and Accurate Description of All the Direct and Principal Cross Roads in England and Wales, and Part of the Roads of Scotland by Lieutenant-Colonel [Daniel] Paterson, 1811. It's on Google Books .

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If you just want to read The Tory Lover, the simplest and best way is on Project Gutenberg:

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/51537/pg51537-images.html

But if you want to dive a little deeper, or even a lot deeper, you'll be delighted and instructed by the annotated edition lovingly put together by Terry Heller in 2023 (downloadable as three PDFs):

Part 1:

https://www.sarahornejewett.org/soj/1-jewettpress/e-Tory%20Lover%20--%20part%201.pdf

Part 2:

https://www.sarahornejewett.org/soj/1-jewettpress/e-tory%20lover%20--%20Part%202.pdf

Part 3:

https://www.sarahornejewett.org/soj/1-jewettpress/e-tory%20lover%20--%20Part%203.pdf

More or less all the information in this post comes either from there or (as regards their travels to Europe) from Sarah Orne Jewett's correspondence and Annie Field's diary: 

https://www.sarahornejewett.org/soj/let/Corresp/1-correspondence.html

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Sarah Orne Jewett's travels to Europe. 

(Locations relevant to The Tory Lover are in bold.)

Sarah Orne Jewett [SOJ] and Annie Fields [AF] travelled to Europe in 1882, 1892, 1898 and 1900. 

1882 

(May-Oct)

Cork, Glengarriff, Enniskillen, Dublin, London, Isle of Wight, Stonehenge, Salisbury, Dawlish, Clovelly, Exeter, Lynton, Stratford-on-Avon, Warwick, Hull (then by ship to Norway, visiting the Ole Bulls), back to Edinburgh and London, then Antwerp, Amsterdam, down the Rhine, Interlaken, Milan, Venice, Florence, Rome, Genoa, Paris, London.

1892

27 Feb - c. 4 Oct

SOJ and AF sailed to Genoa, a rough crossing. In Italy until June, then France, arriving England in mid (?) July. The details of their first days in England are relatively poorly documented, but it seems they came to London, had some days at Bristol, perhaps back to London and then to Ilkley in late July. 

----- We had some days near Bristol at Miss Edwards's house with Katie Bradbury -- it was like a visit to a ghost by which I have no idea of saying that it was altogether sad -- on the contrary! and her library is a room you would like dearly. One always felt that she must be coming into it next minute. I shall tell you much more than this about the Larches some day.

Sarah Orne Jewett to Sarah Wyman Whitman - Letter from Ilkley, 30 July 1892.

["Miss Edwards" was the Egyptologist Amelia Ann Blanford Edwards (1831- 15 April 1892). Miss Edwards died while Jewett and Annie Fields were in Italy. Her home since 1864, was "The Larches" in Westbury-on-Trym. Kate Bradbury was Edwards' companion in her final years (accompanying her on her American lecture tour in 1889-90).]

1898

SOJ and AF arrived by ship in Plymouth on April 18 1898, travelled swiftly through Devon and Somerset, apparently reaching London the following day (presumably by train, e.g. Exeter Taunton Westbury Reading Paddington). Then France: Paris, Provence, Paris, Meaux and Rheims, Paris, and Brittany (Vitré, Mont St Michel, St Malo, Dinan, Tréguier, Quimper, Quiberon, Carnac and Nantes), Paris, Loire valley and Tours, and back to Paris. Crossed the channel in August: London (briefly), Cambridge, Ilkley, Edinburgh (via Carlisle), Riversvale House (Kate Bradbury, now Griffith) at Ashton-under-Lyme, Stratford-upon-Avon, London: visits to the Humphrey Wards at Stocks House near Tring (Herts), Totteridge, to Henry James at Rye where they had a trip to Hastings, Eversley (Hampshire), Windsor, to the Kiplings at Rottingdean,  to the Hallam Tennysons at Haslemere (Surrey); then Ashton-under-Lyme again, and so to their return ship at Liverpool. 

AF's diary, July 11: We took the train for Nantes which Sarah wished to see because Paul Jones sailed away from there and if she writes his story as she hopes to do she will like to have seen the Loire before it sinks into the sea.

1900 

(28 Feb to c. June 1). SOJ, AF and Mary Garrett visited Greece, Turkey ("Constantinople"), Italy and France (including Paris); they did not visit Britain on this trip. 

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Alison Easton, "Nation making and fiction making: Sarah Orne Jewett, The Tory Lover, and Walter Scott, Waverley" [PDF]. Published in 2002, I think. 

https://www.manchesterhive.com/downloadpdf/display/9781526137654/9781526137654.00012.pdf

Argues that The Tory Lover asserts a distinctively nuanced view of the American Revolution that shows the influence of Scott novels such as Waverley in its critique of simple political binaries and its appeal to the practical virtues of compromise. Jewett certainly admired Scott the man, i.e. as seen in Lockhart and in Scott's own journal, letters and essays.