Francis Lathom

Francis Lathom. The Castle of Ollada. a Romance

London:  William Lane at the Minerva-Press, 1795; 2nd ed. 1831.

Contemporary Reviews

The Critical Review, July 1795, p.352:

Another haunted castle! Surely the misses themselves must be tired of so many stories of ghosts, and murders,-though to the misses the ghosts of this novel present perhaps the most harmless part of the dramatis personae. The heroine who could basely elope from her father's house with a young peasant whom she had only twice seen, and to whom she had scarcely ever spoken, is a personage of a far more pernicious nature. For though the heroine of a romance [is] always sure to know 'the true baron upon instinct,"-we do not think it altogether advisable for young ladies to put implicit confidence in such a conductor, and therefore cannot avoid reprobating the example.

The Monthly Review, October 1795

This performance is very properly entitled a Romance. The writer appears to have a fancy plentifully stored, from former romances, with images of love and terror, and a memory not ill furnished with the terms and phrases which belong to the school of fiction. The story, which is laid in Spain, tells of a beauteous damsel, the daughter of a haughty and cruel baron, whose charms enamour Henrico, a peasant of mysterious descent. Their moonlight interviews within a friendly grove; the hero's encounter, in a well-described tournament, with a wealthy duke to whom his mistress had been devoted; with sundry miscellaneous escapes and rescues; are in the true style of romance. Some of the inferior characters are well sketched, particularly that of the simple, credulous, prating Villetta, Matilda's waiting-woman. Had the writer confined himself to his love-tale, and opened it more at large by a fuller display of scenery, sentiment, and character, the performance would have been more complete: but, in order to gratify the fashionable taste, he has introduced a story of a castle supposed to be inhabited by ghosts, but at length discovered to be inhabited by a set of coiners; which will, we apprehend, afford the reader little amusement. We must add that the occupation of these coiners is represented in too favourable a light. The introduction of these incidents has increased the intricacy of the general story, and has obliged the writer to spend a great part of the second volume in explaining mysteries, which after all are not very clearly unfolded, when he ought to have been interesting the feelings of his readers in the fortune of his principal characters. The language is in general correct: but sometimes, in attempting to elevate his style, the writer falls into affected stateliness; for example, when he speaks of a horseman 'conceding half his beast' to another person. The pointing is frequently inaccurate; in the very sentence of the book, the sense is concealed by a wrong use of the parenthesis. We mention these trifles because, notwithstanding the defects of this performance, we discern in it promising marks of ingenuity.

-- Prepared by Brenda Kluck, University of Nebraska, April 2006.
© Brenda Kluck, 2006.