Graham’s The Angry Tide: A Murder brings A Reprieve (Poldark Novel 7, Cornwall 1798-99) (1)

Ross (Robin Ellis) turns to embrace Demelza (Angharad Rees), Enys (Michael Cadman) looking on

Dear Friends and readers,

At long last, Graham’s The Angry Tide (Poldark novel 7). This is the first of another two-part blog on one of Graham’s novels.

To explain the subtitle: when Rowella’s husband, Solway in a maddened rage murders Whitworth after Solway sees Whitworth having sex with Rowella, Morwenna is freed, but it takes time (as she has been so wounded by among other things nightly rapes) for her to recover and Drake to pull back from a marriage he almost became part of so they may marry (see Part Two).

The fuel of The Angry Tide might be said to be anger. It may be located precisely in each case. Rage brings to a crisis and resolution the stories of two couples: Whitworth’s liaison with Rowella is discovered by her husband, Solway, who, in a hot rage, murders Whitworth, opening a way for Drake and Morwenna to marry; when Drake is told Morwenna is free, although he has now agreed to marry the good (intelligent, kind, loving if crippled) Rosina Hobyns whom he does not love, Drake breaks the engagement the night before they are to be wed, and (probably) her father, enraged, sets fire to his shop and destroys it all. George’s cold rage when once again his suspicion is ignited that Elizabeth’s son, Valentine, is Ross’s and not his, causes Elizabeth to bring on a premature childbirth, the medicine for which kills her. Having come to London to renew and build their lives together anew, Ross’s lingering anger at Demelza for loving Hugh Armitage ignites his wrath against the insulting vicious behavior of murderous amoral rake, Monk Adderley (an adder) towards Demelza when she shows herself unable to reject Adderley coldly; they duel, Ross murders Monk, and Demelza returns to Cornwall without him.

Some of the lives’ failures do not erupt in rage: the experiment for Caroline and Enys in London is a more quiet failure: Caroline has gone to London after the death of their small daughter, Sarah; he joins her in London around the time Demelza comes to London with Ross; but he cannot bear to live without being of use as a doctor, and returns to Cornwall with Demelza. She seems to contain herself or accept the situation, partly because she may after all love (erotically) Ross more. Sam too accepts his loss of Emma when she marries elsewhere, his needs partly satisfied by his central function in the lives of his converts in his church.

Nonetheless, it is this diffuse anger at life, its frustrations, and the necessity of compromise and acceptance to survive and find some gratification that way that is the center of this book.

Insofar as this blog brings out the instinctive feminism of Graham’s work it show on how one of the seriers’s heroines, (Morwenna), is a woman whose life has been (in effect) confiscated (her coerced marriage is presented as nightly rape). Before the later 20th century no one presents the truth about such marriages, especially is the honeymoon night rarely shown (exceptions are Montolieu’s Caroline de Lichtfield and Sand’s Valentine).

I keep waiting to be disappointed, and find the books fall off. But no, here’s another I fell into and just loved as I went.

For an outline to Angry Tide, Books one and two, see comment.

*************
Book One, Chapters 1-3: We are re-introduced: memories, landscape, politics, at home

The opening chapters are a reprise — Ross is again returning from somewhere (this time his year in London as an MP), it’s a reprise in a fully developed situation.

The Angry Tide opens like the first book (alluded to) with Ross in a carriage coming home, this time with a cleric and wife and grown daughter inside and (it turns out) Osborne Whitworth. Ross’s first utterance to Whitworth’s socializing question, how was Westminster: “It’s what you make it … like so many things.”

Shameless, very plump and overdressed, Whitworth now begins an attempt to urge Ross to help him to a third living; before the carriage ride is over, Ross has semi-agreed to help Whitworth if Whitworth will agree to pay 100 pounds rather than 45 to Odgers, his curate for work at one of his two livings. This is Sawle, actually in Ross’s parish: Ross wanted Odgers to have the position in the first place, and on 100 pounds Odgers’ family will still live indigently. The utterly egoistic Whitworth explodes in indignation: if Odgers is not making it, it shows what a poor manager he is; he Whitworth gets only 200; is he to give up 100 for this?

And so Ross exits the coach.

The narrator has had the chance to relive for us Ross’s first home-coming, and the contrast of then (1783) and now (1798). Ross’s uncertainty about his home-coming from Demelza (“I have loved only two women in my life and they have both turned to other men”) brings us back to the ending of The Four Swans where Demelza collapsed in Ross’s arms and they reunited around the child Clowance (reading to her). Now we are told he’s been gone for probably nearly a year, and didn’t take her with him. So after all there has been something of an estrangement. We enter Whitworth’s thoughts as he looks forward to re-seeing Morwenna, his “unwelcoming wife.” An unexpected parallel is drawn between our hero and the vile vicar.

A motif I find in many better mens’ books is that of the male who is anxious about the love and loyalty to him of a woman whom he values intensely — more he fears than she values him. We see this in the Enys-Caroline match certainly (alluded to by Whitworth in Chapter 2 as having produced a puny “brat” — a disabled child I wondered?)

The last part of the chapter switches to Demelza and her thoughts and also now the wide deep landscape of the locale which Graham is so good at allusively suggesting. She reverts to her sense that she may no longer “retain” Ross’s love. He’s been away for too long; she had been having tea with Rosina Hoblyn, quiet, sensitive, once crippled (saved by Enys) and Demelza’s wish to unite Rosina with Sam or Drake has led to her bringing Rosina over to see her brothers.

Rosina Hoblyns (Peta Mason)

So we re-meet of Sam (and remember his disappointment over Emma) and again Drake, now presented as downright depressed and [from Demelza’s standpoint I guess] obsessively unable to forget Morwenna.

I suppose it’s here the conventional reader would surmise they (Morwenna and Drake must get together) for a happy ending is what is often expected; I now know they do (from a give-away sentence in Graham’s Memoirs of a Private Man). My experience of the book was not at all lessened to know this; rather I read less anxiously and did need not worry Drake will make an irretrievable match that will hurt him or Rosina or Morwenna will be put away into a ruel asylum by Whitworth

Then Demelza sees a horseman on the horizon, and says to herself, of course it can’t be (would Ross not have written, sent word), but of course it is. With the evening light behind her, she begins to recognize him (as we do from ways of walking, shapes) and “she began to run down the hill, shoes scuffling on the rough track, hair flying to meet him.”

Chapter 2 is the contrast: Morwenna, Whitworth’s wife waiting there for him with some snack. It’s here Whitworth first clearly formulates in his mind his plan to put her away and thinks about how he can’t get the doctor (Behenna) to agree to sign the certificate. She’s not mad, but will not go to bed with him, and in his thoughts he presents as fantasy her idea he had an affair with her sister, Rowena. But then interwoven is a letter to him from said Rowena, and we see her lying conniving mind asking him to come to her for two books of his so we know Morwenna making up none of it.

In mini-series she is much softened: here Rowella (Julie Dawn Cole) is the night Solway (Stephen Reynolds) finally catches her with Whitworth

Then the narrative moves to George and Elizabeth, George having pushed Elizabeth into too elaborate a dinner for Sir Christopher Hawkins, MP; George has not given up trying again for a place in parliament; now he has decided he will get it by spending huge amounts of money. He will bribe everyone whatever way is necessary. At dinner, he points to his large income, and we hear a (to me ugly) discussion conjuring up the realities of Cornish elections.

Throughout the novels there are little details which keep half-exonerating Elizabeth as a personality: she did not want to have this overdone kind of dinner, knew better. In Rowella’s letter to her we see that she receives Rowella though Rowella has married supposedly meanly (Solway is a librarian, originally from very poor people). We see Elizabeth has a heart and (could think) had she married better (a decenter man, Ross) then would have been better, but then she would not marry Ross, would she? Much depth here, and I admire especially how Elizabeth’s character is glimpsed.

Chapter 3 we turn back to Ross and Demelza at home, talking over his food.

We see that Graham is emphasizing the strain, the disillusion and inability of Ross and Demelza “to exorcise the ghosts” of their lives together. Has no one tried to creep into her bed since he’s been away; she says (slightly ironic) of his assertion he’s had no women: “It seems you’ve been a monk” during the near year he was away in London.

Later in the evening Jane Gimlett [a servant not brought into the films] came in to take away the supper things and they moved into the old parlour, which looked and smelt the same to Ross as it had done since childhood. He noted, however, the re-covered chair, the two new vases, with flowers in them: bluebells, tulips, wallflowers. In those years when Demelza had been growing out of servitude and childhood to become his companion and then his wife, almost the first evidence of the changing relationship had been the appearance of flowers in this room. He remem­bered with great vividness the day after he had first slept with her Elizabeth had called, and Demelza had come in in the middle of the conversation, barelegged, rough clothed, unkempt, with a sheaf of bluebells on her arm. And she had offered them to Elizabeth, and Elizabeth, probably I sensing something, had refused them. She had said they would fade on the way home. And after she had gone Demelza had come to sit at his feet, an instinctive movement as it were to claim him. Well, life had changed a little since then. Demelza had changed since then (p. 36)

For a start she’s thinner.

He then visits his mine in the morning dawn and goes down with a hard hat and candle; we get deep landscape, geography, some economics and his mind returns to his private obsessions: “He went out and stood listening to the sleepy chirp Somewhere up the lane” … much about farm, sea, the white air, the tide, the beach (nut trees, pigs).

It was not yet far out. The trivial event, of course, for God’s sake: he had resumed intercourse with his wife, for God’s sake. Fit subject for ribald dialogue in one of the fashionable plays in London. Yet it hadn’t quite turned out as expected. What would one would have expected despite his brave words, perhaps the casual. Or perhaps the fiercely resentful, a claiming of a right long since in abeyance or gone and nearly lost. But in the event it had never progressed beyond the tender. Somehow a much-derided emotion had got in the way and turned it , all to kindness. Whatever happened now, however they met today, or tomorrow, in whatever form constraint or hurt or injury or resentment reared its head, he must remember that. As she would, he knew. If only one could altogether exorcise the ghosts. When he got back to the house all were still sleeping (p. 42)

I particularly like how he regards the sex that went on between him & Demelza. One sees this adult or disillusioned and relaxed attitude towards sex in the Memoirs of a Private Man too.

The third part of the chapter brings us back to the couple talking again, now about politics in parliament. Ross (Graham himself) is alive to the reactionary nature of all Wilberforce’s stances and bills except in the area of abolition. It appears that Ross spoke in the house against the hundred of crime for which a person could be hung, tried to jolt them into seeing the analogy between slavery and the use of children in the mines. He was called to order, was not much appreciated (had a “cold nod” from Wilberforce). Falmouth (Ross’s patron) was not surprised (and has not attempted to influence his candidate — we are to surmise because Falmouth knows he won’t get anywhere); Falmouth has had Ross into dine and he’s met with some exiles (a Cornish club) but from this little vignette we see why Ross returned home early.

Book One, Chapters 4 – 8:

Demelza has Drake come to Nampara in an effort to get him to speak of his depression, and see Rosina and he could make a go of it.

Drake Carne (Kevin McNally) in the first days at his forge

Drake tells her to leave him be (nicely). Ross and Demelza converse over this and Ross says he has seen Geoffrey Charles in London and Geoffrey has changed a lot, he’s Francis Poldark reincarnated and this is not a character Drake can understand (Bk 1, ch 4, pp. 49-56).

A brief natural pleasant yet uncomfortable encounter of Drake and Rosina: he is too willing to help her, she says she’s not a cripple (pp. 57-8)

The vile Ossie’s adventures continue: we see him sidle up to Pearce and discover that Pearce has been speculating with money not his own. That might include Ross’s, and also George’s. I’m coming to see bankers have ever been near crooks; that’s why they put up such a solemn heavy established ethical look. Then Whitworth’s with Dr Behenna insinuating he wants Behenna to put Morwenna away. Behenna punts but does not refuse (Bk 1, Ch 4, pp. 59-69).

This is the sort of anxiety Graham’s good at and is picked up by the film. We like Morwenna and fear for her; we see a possible mismatch for Drake on the way.

Book 1, Chapter 5: politics & money: George, Cary and Nicholas Warleggan talking of the enormous sums George taking out of the business to buy himself a borough. George plans to pressure St John Peter whose aristocratic spendthrift ways George has been using to make someone beholden to him:

The film includes the scene of pressuring: George (Ralph Bates), Nicholas (Alan Tivern), Peters (?Eric Dodson)

Then Elizabeth and her mother-in-law, Mary who is still not comfortable with this upper class but decent woman; Elizabeth proposes to visit her cousin, and who should be coming out of Rowella’s house but Whitworth.

Book 1 Chapter 6: an effective set of vignettes: Ross riding with Dwight (conversation referred to above); he feels responsibility for this marriage

And then Ross with his banker, Pascoe once again (they are a pair supporting one another since Ross Poldark, Poldark Novel 1). Pascoe and they talk of expenditures and George’s doings and buying people, a threat. Pascoe’s bank not invulnerable (pp. 83-92). I just love Enys’s voice; he’s another aspect of Graham, the “born pessimist” and sceptical as reading man, sensitive, doctor.

Book 1, Chapter 7: Drake’s visitors, Sam and then Geoffrey Charles. We see the distance that has grown between Drake and Geoffrey Charles and the difference that simply exists between Sam and Drake. Graham’s characters are persuasive because they are so particularized and left flexible. Sam still would take Emma (but not she him); again Rosina proposed to Drake, and now Drake says he cannot as long as Morwenna “in hell.”

The meeting between Geoffrey Charles shows his wanting a mistress and talking of these woman as things (Drake does not like) and casual attitude toward life of Francis; makes Drake uncomfortable and yet the two get along too for at the end Geoffrey Charles expresses deep appreciation of real friendship, loyalty, not the shallow semi-dysfunctional sort that passes for most people’s experience (pp. 93-104)

Chapter 7: A wonderful debunking characterization of Napoleon and Nelson is accompanied by an (uncharacteristic) plumping for an unknown general Graham apparently thought well of: General Hoche.

An important scene: Enys does defy Caroline’s line of demarcation (Caroline says Enys should limit his practice to those living nearby and do it for less hours). Enys comes to see Whitworth and talk to Mowenna. He refuses to sign a certificate putting her away. Without him, Behenna doesn’t have the unscrupulous nature to do it, and is probably worried abuot losing his reputation. Women were some of his patients too (including Elizabeth Warleggan be it not forgotten and she has sense and a kind of integrity). Enys concedes Whitworth’s sudden mention that his wife will not have sex with him, but says he’s the kind of man who if a husband cannot get his wife to love him, thinks the man has to leave her be.

This drives Whitworth back to Rowella’s body and she makes room for his visits on Thursday night when her husband visits his relatives. Soon he is giving Rowella 20 pounds and it’s this money we see also that provides a motive for Rowella. Her character is kept from us — we only see her as Whitworth does, a Lilith, a tease, someone who rouses him but he would be easily turned to call a witch and hurt irreparably, or from Morwenna, angry, indignant. He now thinks to hire a governess for his boy and thus call Morwenna’s bluff: she still refuses him based on her vow to kill the son.

And a scene of net fishing: home now and much relieved, Ross enters into the life of the household and community. There is an article about Graham’s sense of humor in the Poldarks which is called odd. An instance here: Ross and Demelza’s 3 year old son feeds the pigs grounds from beer making and they get drunk and sick and when Sir Hugh Bodrugan comes over for one of his usual attempts to grope Demelza we get a oddly funny scene of these pigs suffering and stumbling about. Ross and Demelza in a kind of truce: Graham says they are a couple who do not get on one another’s nerves; there might be a war, but there will be no skirmishes.

Then net-fishing: the shore, the cliffs, rooted in the place.

Book One, Chapters 9-10: The Trenwith party, mining disaster, Sam’s’ heroism and grief: Emma’s letter

The dinner party: Caroline (Judy Geeson) comfortable with Adderley (Malcolm Tierney), Dwight (Michael Cadman) not so, standing by

Chapter 9 swirls around a huge extravagant dinner party George insists on having: Elizabeth would have had something far more modest; but he is spending his way into parliament and one important part of this spending is the elegant dinner, dancing, time in a landscape, sleeping at an ancient estate he can offer – where you meet other middling to powerful people too. We get semi-ironic portraits of the individuals who come. Among them a new character: Monk Adderley: he seems at first a mild, courteous gentleman, but he has served in China and India 8 years, and became a duellist, was discharged (partly as a murderer), his reason has affected — like Tholly Tregirls, a wild man, an outsider (sociopath who nonetheless fits in) in disguise

Then the focus turns to outside the house, in the landscape: Ross cannot resist coming over to the landscape to see what was once his house. He does feel the loss.

Ross (Robin Ellis) as outsider looking in from window on terrace

What has been happening with Aunt Agatha’s grave. He comes up to Elizabeth who is walking outside, and while she is at first put off, she eventually registers concern about her sons. They discuss Geoffrey Charles as another Francis, he asks after Valentine which upsets her; she wishes she had not spoken so truthfully to him before. (She the sort of woman who survives high by her silences.)

Then to them Monk Adderley who says he thought at first Ross was a “threadbare troubadour who had come to sing outside our windows .. and was being dismissed without his proper pourboire.” Monk asks Ross is he’s Falmouth’s man, and Ross says “no one owns me,” and they will meet another time.

Ross reaches home and again strained talk with Demelza as he tells her of his meeting with Elizabeth. She of course knows he and she are “left out” of these social functions — and he out of Trenwith. Nonetheless, he should not risk himself. They speak of Hoblyn and especially his daughter as a possible wife for Drake. Ross then looks at Demelza and asks if he and she have “failed each other,” and the narrator as Demelza (third person indirect) says this should not have been so said.

Chapter 10: a near disaster, a flood, going too deep into the mine, Sam the hero this time and then Ross, as they rescue the men from a mine disaster. The focus on Sam allows for a return to Emma in the narrator’s mind and the chapter is brought to a moving close when Sam receives a badly spelt letter from Emma telling Sam of her coming marriage. He takes it off to read alone. Sam cries noisily we are told, the comic note deepening the feel.

The male idealism theme: the man of integrity idealizes the sexual relationship. The letter from Emma rejecting Sam finally. Emma we are told at the opening of the chapter cannot read, and her letter is a cross between near illiteracy and eloquence — not very probable I suppose :). Then the Daniels family characterized: Beth, Ena, the Hoskins who lost a man to the state’s determination to make an example (hanging) in the previous book, an event felt as sinister and shameful by Ross. This is Sam’s world still. His real sense of loss.

*************************
Book Two, Chapters 1-13

The opening of Chapter 1 re-situates us feeling-fully in the geology and climate of mines, land, and the feel of life in Cornwall from Ross’s rooted perspective. He can’t get himself to return to London and says Falmouth will not mind. They discuss Sam’s loss of Emma and Demelza blames herself for not trying to encourage it (we see her encouragement doesn’t always help) but then we hear of Sarah’s sickness. Ross knows how frail her heart is and goes over, and yes, she’s dying.

Chapter 2 opens on George’s new maneuverings over Pearce and includes Elizabeth’s awareness that something is wrong with the Whitworth household where no nurse ever stays for long, and something not well with Morwenna.

On the mini-series (Season 2, Part 11), Elizabeth (Jill Townsend) visits Morwenna (Jane Wymark) but cannot fathom this situation

Graham then presents Caroline telling Dwight she’s leaving him for a while. Well to me, this is not a persuasive chapter. I don’t feel the inner life of the woman who makes such a decision is brought before us. There have been hints sex is not all that great between them, but this is not brought up and it’s never explained. There is in fact little explanation except she thinks this will be good for them — he doesn’t. I suggest he’s shying away from presenting women’s sexuality and Caroline’s graphic desires and frustration. Yes she’s aware that she’s in the way of Dwight following his profiession, how it will kill him to leave those patients she’s permitted him to have, that Dwight has been bored with their socializing but the break is coming out of more than that.

(I know that Graham did write frankly and radically of women’s sexuality in his mysteries, for example, Marnie. I will be reading (and perhaps post too) Graham’s Marnie and also see the movie and read an excellent film study — it was a success d’estime and a financial flop, in this resembling The OxBow Incident).

We are back to a broader view of the political world (Napoleon, Bonaparte’s wife, Nelson’s) an Dwight spends Christmas at Nampara. Christmas time includes a visit from Verity, now (we are told) this happy woman — the formula for happiness here is “marriage to the good man,” and in her case lucking in because her stepson is a courteous intelligent younger (uncomplicated as yet because for example he never murdered a woman — which little detail Graham does sometimes forget about Blamey) version of the husband.

Verity has before functioned as Ross’s good companion, the de-sexed relationship which allows him to speak fully and as someone who is endlessly sympathetic. It is to her he acknowledges that he is an “uncomfortable” person to live with, that he cannot or does not have ‘all the control over your feelings that you should have — and then thoughts and feeling surge up in you like — an angry tide. And it is hard, sometimes it is hard to control the tide.” That his Che Guevara self, the rebel is more than a matter of principle we’ve seen repeatedly (as in the rape of Elizabeth, in the looting of the ships on that beach — it happens again in this novel and again Ross condons it, only this time has the control not to join in so paradoxically the people get to bring home more with less fuss). Demelza Verity says sees through ‘the dark part’

Then one of these neutral letters from Caroline (Chapter 3), now living in London to which Ross is headed. In Four Swans she was the least seen of the four women (except for Verity — a fifth I suppose) and this letter is oddly flat (pp. 204-5). It has a sexual frisson: her life in London “lacks a dimension of Realty” she misses. She describes her social life as dysfunctional superficies — an outlook which matches Ross’s. She’s waiting for him.

I was going to say the odd thing about the book’s presentation of Caroline Penvenen is how little she is onstage. She is presented through her letters, and we see a lot more of Ross talking to Dwight than Ross to Caroline. (The film is quite different here, bringing her forward at every opportunity — the gay lady of Restoration comedy updated and made sentimental was thought to be attractive.)

Now Ross is off in London and does not write very much. So we are left to Demelza as central consciousness and her doings for Drake. He is at last persuaded by time, his loneliness, need, and Rosina Hoblyn’s high merit and kindness to marry her. A touching scene between Drake and Rosina where Drake tells Rosina of his love for Morwenna and why he’s willing to marry Rosina, and her quick yes anyway; their visit to her parents and mother’s delight and father’s chip-on-the-shoulder stupdity and tactlessness (is she pregnant is his implication?).

Then Drake and Demelza: she is told of his decision, and they talk of marrying without intense love, for he will tell Rosina the truth and asks his sister how it was with her marriage originally and how their relationship is today, and she replies:

‘No man should marry a girl just because she’s suitable, still less because she’d make someone a nice sister-in-law. It is your life, brother. And marriages, once undertaken, are not to be dissolved. Only … I want you to be happy, not lonely and alone. It would be good to have someone to work with and someone to work for. I don’t want you to get set in loneliness. And sometimes ­love grows.’
He got up and went to the smaller window, peered out. ‘Did it with you, Demelza? I’ve often thought but never wished to ask.’
The question brought a tightness to her breast. ‘No. It was with me always. But not with Ross. It grew with Ross ­over the years. He did not love me when he married me. But it grew so over the years’ (p. 211)

We know that she did not join Ross because he invited her to come based on Caroline’s longing for her (she said) and that she had seen that in his letters he does not he talk of coming to get Demelza to join him, nor say that next fall she will join him (as she offered to before she left).

The next chapter (4) opens with Whitworth having finally hired a nurse who will guard his son and his immdiate going to his wife the first Monday night (he picks twice a week) and demanding and wresting sex from her.

Marital rape of Morwenna (Jane Wymark) by Whitworth (discreetly dramatized in films)

Horrible horrible. This time she submits more quietly than she did the first, but it’s noticeable she stops all her public charities and starts to look worse once again.

Chapter 4 moves us into character we’ve heard of but no met: Arthur Solway. A strong portrait of this highly intelligent poor boy made good by schooling, education and then the chance offer of a job as a librarian. It’s a powerful realistic portrait of the level of people above the Cranes and below the gentry. We see him in his astonishment that Rowella Chynoweth wanted to marry him, how much he disliked the pressure she put on him to negotiate a bigger dowry with her vicar brother-in-law, Osborne Whitworth, and now how on the one hand he is so delighted to be doing so well (a small note is again made on Elizabeth’s behalf, while the mother-in-law does not pay attention to Solway, Elizabeth is polite, gracious, decent to him).

Yet a nervousness is gotten across, and we see the strained home he came from on Thursday nights when he goes there. It’s Thursday night Osborne visits Rowella.
Solway has gone to visit his family and his sister has an epileptic fit and he returns early to tell Rowella he will be much later when he comes home finally and sees the tracks of a large footprint in the snow, and suddenly knows — as he has half-known something was wrong. There had been these sudden sums of money and lovely things in the house he couldn’t account for. He climbs up to peep in the window and sees his wife in postures he never saw her before naked with a large naked man over her. He falls back sickened.

Chapter 5: The old man Cary Warleggan rides over to John St Peter to demand payment of loans. Warleggan is despised by St Peter at heart (for St Peter is gentry) and he is distressed to have these loans asked in. No hunting now, his wife’s dowry was the collateral and apparently the bank is starting to be without funds.

Ossie so happy to dominate Morwenna at last — sickening this, and his not being able to resist one last Thursday night. His selfish abhorrent ways of thought. How he kisses Rowella and arouses her suspicions. She now wants money for the roof; we know he won’t be able to rid himself of her as he thinks. Her story her husband suddenly behaving strangely and sick. This worries him as he doesn’t want to catch it; it’s also a subconscious worry.

And then the scene of Whitworth riding home, a sudden ferocious attack, and his seeing Solway and realizing why We experience Solway’s mistaken killing of Whitworth. Whitworth fights back but he falls from his horse and breaks his head.

Solway’s story is anticipated by that of Mark Daniel Demelza (Poldark Novel 2) . This is a male fiction kind of story and reminds me of how men will write of false accusations of rape (uncommon in reality as women suffer from accusations of rape themselves). Graham does write of men beating their wive to death, of murdering them (high rate) and murdering the lover.

Solway murdering Whitworth

Events come to a crashing disaster for several of our characters: as one might expect told of the death (murder as we know) of Osborne Whitworth, Morwenna does not bounce back: she becomes more hysterical, goes deeper into her depressive state and is treated with barely minimal respect by Whitworth’s mother.

Drake, hearing of the death of Whitworth, cannot get himself to go through with his marriage to Rosina, and the night before it’s set to happen, he visits Rosina telling her. A powerful sequence.

Drake tells Rosina

The funeral is terrible somehow with Elizabeth looking very bad (she knows it was her doing, her complicity).

In the film George looks grimmer than Elizabeth

Rowella does not come, and the narrator tells us, her enraged husband had gone home to beat her up too and she is keeping out of sight. Garlanda is there. Morwenna says herself: “I don’t exist any longer. Nothing of me — it’s all gone – mind — body — soul, even … “she goes on to compare herself to death, “ashes, dust, sand, dirt, blood, semena, urine, pus, excrement, ordure” (p. 263). To me she is a Clarissa figure (as in Richardson’s 18th century novel); had Clarissa not died and yielded to coercion. Nightly rapes don’t do anyone any good; the complete lack of integrity or decent feeling she had to live with were too much for her.

Drake then goes straight to Morwenna who cannot bear the sight of him — or perhaps at this point any man. He flees and seems to live on the landscape but comes to himself and returns to his shop, to find Sam waiting for him and the shop burnt to the ground. Who destroyed we do not know — as the characters have no idea as yet that Whitworth was murdered (though the incident feels suspicious and not sufficiently explained when a heavy stick is found). We may guess it was Jacka Hoblyn, Rosina’s father. But we do not know. Sam is there waiting for Drake and takes him back to Reath Cottage where they first set up home together. Beauty of Sam’s character: “Come along, old love …” I’ll give ee a helping hand …” (p 287)

The fineness of Rosina’s character is seen in her first conversation with Demelza who after all did engineer this match. Rosina is not bitter nor does she want revenge, although this is the second time this crippled girl has lost a bethrothed. She does say to Demelza — and we know this to be true — that had Drake married her, he “would never’ve left me. I know that.” The parallel with Ross and Demelza is clear: Ross married Demelza without loving her and now will never leave her (p. 278). We are to feel that in a way it’s sad that Drake did not marry her — for her sake and perhaps his.

And then the bank is threatened, with Demelza alone to cope. She does cope. The money the company had made and intended to pay the men with she puts in the bank to try to rescue it from going under, so now they have nothing left. It was brought down by Cary Warleggan calling in loans and that ultimately by George.

Ross comes home and we get this intense passionate conversation between Demelza and Ross as they reface the same destitution they once knew. He is characterized as “furious” before he arrives (his temperament from his time in London and then the frustrations of the trip) but calms down and admires what Demelza has done. When he first arrives, he is aware of how she removes her cheek from him when he goes to kiss her, but as he talks and (among other things) tells of how he has told his landlady to prepare for her coming, she too begins to enter into the reality of their mutual sustaining respect, affection relationship.

Ross then sets to work (Chapters 11-12) and shows himself extremely capable, having matured and learnt a lot: he manages to renegotiate moneys to save Pascoe’s bank (using his patron, Basset’s money and influence in part) and himself becomes a banker in the enterprise and opens his mines again.

The day the new hospital is opened Elizabeth knows she is with child again (Chapter 13). There is a dinner party where Elizabeth’s pregnancy leads her to faint and thus she cannot (as she had hoped) fool George Warleggan into thinking a 9 month baby is an 8th month again as she must confess to her pregnancy earlier than she had hoped. Ross thinks of how no one tries to prevent distress. 3 Chynoweth women: Elizabeth, Rowella, Morwenna. Conversation overheard about misery of Catholics. Ross has a direct conflict with George calling him a liar and outlining how he undermined the bank — a parallel to today’s banks too here.
Late June.

Ends on Ross a member of the newly formed bank on July 1, 1799: of Pascoe, Bassett, with a list of partners, one of whom is Ross Poldark. Not money but character is what he contributed.

I hope I’ve discussed the chapters in ways sufficient to indicate the themes and depth of feeling. Among other things, this novelist shows how all human beings are intertwined, and how socially no one lives alone, and how we can as a group be destroyed by a single horror who gets in power and how a person can be destroyed by the group. People’s moral natures matter. What they do matters, small things amid the larger social structures matter. This is not sceptical or nihilistic fiction.

Ellen