Description

Published 1945: Hardcover / Good Condition

Original black cloth with gilt block titles on the spine and original dust jacket. 507 clean slightly age-toned pages, mild speckled foxing on a few pages, previous owners signature on the first free page. Boards slightly rubbed and faded with time. Dust jacket slightly rubbed and faded with time and chipped along the edges consistent with age but remains intact.. (RB274)

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The story opens in Revolutionary America shortly before the surrender of Yorktown, and closes at sea off the shores of St. Helena nearly forty years later. In the intervening space the scene has ranged from a great plantation house in Virginia to the decks of a Republican man-o'-war in the days of the Terror; from castle and château in Germany and France to Parisian school and English inn; from palace to prison bulk; from Napoleon's Imperial General Headquarters to the interior of the Nautilus, the submarine designed by Robert Fulton; from Welsh 'parole' town to the garden of the Governor of St. Helena. This book is the drama of love and conflicting loyalties, of the desire for vengeance, of the problem set by the fate of vanquished dictators and is is play out against a background which in many ways parallels the conditions from which we have begun to emerge. Publisher: Jonathan Cape, thirty Bedford Square, London, first published March 1944, second impression August 1944, third impression April 1946

Forgotten Masterpiece.

Vaughan Wilkins is mostly forgotten these days. Of all his numerous works, only And So Victoria seems to have attracted much attention, which is rather a pity as he wrote quite a few interesting works, mostly historical novels set in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Of these, for my money Being Met Together is the best.

Stretching over nearly half a century, from the American Revolution to the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, it focuses on the experiences of Anthony Purvis, an American whose father had died in battle with the Redcoats, and whose grandmother raises him on a diet of English misdeeds, real or exaggerated, so that he grows up bitterly anti-British.

With the advent of the French Revolution and ensuing wars, she is wholeheartedly on the side of France, and, partly for this reason and partly due to a quarrel with a rival for his guardianship, takes 12-year-old Anthony to Europe for education and later to support the French cause. From here the story takes us over much of Western Europe, and even to Britain, which last is to prove important.

He is of course deeply disappointed by Napoleon’s defeat, and becomes involved in a conspiracy to rescue the Emperor from St Helena. However, his feelings have grown increasingly mixed. His time in Britain, staying with a couple whose son had perished at American hands in the same war, goes a long way to heal his bitterness and bring about reconciliation, while on St Helena he witnesses an episode which I understand really happened, and which together with some other memories serves to belatedly unreconcile him from Napoleon.

Yet he is in a cleft stick. Should he abandon the planned rescue mission, he will be permanently estranged from his still Anglophobic grandmother, and more than likely murdered as a traitor by his fellow-conspirators. How he solves this dilemma (or has it solved for him) makes for a really brilliant ending.

Written in 1944, the novel shows its vintage in some ways. Indeed, while at school in France young Anthony studies under a brutal schoolmaster whose persecution drives another student to attempt suicide. Needless to say the villain is German and his victim Jewish. However, it later emerges that the victim has survived, which proves providential for Anthony.

The note of Anglo-American reconciliation clearly has contemporary events in mind. Indeed the title itself comes from the preamble to the Atlantic Charter, But this doesn’t detract in any serious way from a great story which deserves to be better known. Read and enjoy.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9418312-being-met-together