Publisher's Synopsis
Leonard Merrick (1864 - 1939) was an English novelist. Although largely forgotten today, he was widely admired by his peers, J. M. Barrie called Merrick the "novelist's novelist."
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An excerpt from the Introduction by Neil Munro.
"The Worldlings" has in it almost every element of Merrick's attractiveness as a tale-teller, save perhaps his humour, here kept severely in restraint as a quality out of key in a story founded on "one of the passionate "cruces" of life, where duty and inclination come nobly to the grapple." The conventionality of the plot, however, and the superficial curiosities it evokes, may at a first reading leave less impressive its grasp of human character, that quality which its author's admirers best like in him. Yet one comes upon returned South Africans who place "The Worldlings" among Merrick's highest achievements. The vraisemblance of its earlier chapters, with the airs and manners of life on the Fields deployed in those colours that there predominate in the landscape and the minds of men, possibly appeals peculiarly to the exiles of Africa, but they are intrigued, furthermore, no doubt, by the story itself, with its sharp social contrasts, wherein a man yesterday a beggarly overseer to-day is living the life of a lord in the stateliest English surroundings. This vision of a possible sudden affluence must always be dear to the imagination of men occupied loathsomely in an alien atmosphere of 100 degrees in the shade, in association with Zulus and Kaffirs, and ever carried on from day to day through their squalid search for gems by the hope of a possible Koh-i-noor or Cullinan.
Not that the Diamond Fields now, or in the days when Merrick was there, directly present any such glittering possibilities to the overseer. As Maurice Blake, the hero of "The Worldlings," found in the years of the New Rush, the Fields proffer no better prospect than a living wage to anyone who can secure no proprietary interest in the precious stuff he handles, and who must see in Kimberley less a mining camp than a vulgar share market. Yet through a thousand hopeless dawns will men of spirit maintain illusions, cherish dreams, and one surmises that Merrick in his story ministered deliberately to this almost universal human aptitude to speculate upon the possibilities of sudden wealth. It is the theme of a myriad tales, and some of them the best in the world. Sudden wealth being, in the nature of things, unlikely to any overseer on the Fields, and too ridiculous to postulate in Maurice Blake's case as a result of theft or I.D.B., there remained to the author the alternative of an unexpected English inheritance for his hero, which should, at a flash, release him from his purgatory. It would have been banal to have Blake merely a baronet's son incognito; much more piquant play was to be made by having him impersonate one. The story of Sir Roger Tichborne is older than the Trial of the Claimant; it is one of the original thirty-six possible plots (or whatever the number may be) to which every story in the world may be traced. But the Tichborne imposture is what we first think of when the worldling's career is lamented. Merrick inevitably made his hero another Tichborne; but illiterate Richard Ortons are, in a book, as in real life, impossible creatures to thrust through conversational engagements with members of the "upper circles" while maintaining the cloak of importance, and consequently Merrick's hero had to be something of a cultured man....