She and I, Volume 1 by John Conroy Hutcheson

The setting is a dull suburb in London, just after the middle of the nineteenth century. The hero spots a very pretty young lady in church, and falls in love with her. The first problem is to get an introduction. He manages this, but the girl’s mother, with an eye to the long-term, knows that our hero is not well-off, while others, who we can see are not the sort of person the girl would like to marry, are. Various parties and expeditions involving the church’s congregation take place, and eventually the wooing of the young lady appears successful.

The book is altogether in a different style to Hutcheson’s later works, which are mostly nautical. Possibly a period of twenty years separates this book from the later ones. Certainly this book has about it, at times, a feeling of the experimental, particularly in the use of certain words, which one feels Hutcheson may have thought up, and which have not “caught on.” Another symptom is the use of unusual hyphenated words, and an over-use of common ones. There are also several quotations from poetry, which one does not mind while they are in English, or perhaps French, but which get a bit tedious when they are in other languages. I particularly dislike this habit when one of these foreign poems is used at the start of the chapter. Couldn’t a good translation have done just as well?