Johnny Ludlow, First Series

Stories from a Worcestershire village told by a boy in a squire's household: a poisoning, a lost will, a boy who drowns, a governess with a past, and the small justice of neighbours. Mrs Henry Wood wrote the Johnny Ludlow papers anonymously for her own magazine, and the critics who had dismissed East Lynne praised them without knowing whose they were. They are her best work by a distance. Fifty-seven plates of village life and cathedral closes, from Constable's Salisbury views to Wilkie's cottages, keep the old England of these tales before the eye.