God Is an Englishman (The Swann Family Saga: Volume 1)

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Giles, the family scholar, meets his future fiancée as he is walking across the country after he graduates from boarding school. She turns out to be the daughter of a very wealthy industrialist, and though she loves Giles very much, and he loves her, she is vastly spoiled. So much so, that Giles, who is extremely sympathetic to the plight of the working person, finds himself obliged to break up with her shortly before they are due to be married. She promptly disappears, and he is never really the same after that until he finds her again, and discovers, to his surprise, that she has been spending her time finding out for herself what it is like to live like the working class. Alex, the oldest son, who chooses the risks and hardships of a military career and wins glory in the Sudan. Horne, Donald; Horne, Myfanwy (2007). Dying: a memoir. Ringwood, Victoria: Viking. p.265. ISBN 978-0-670-07102-9. Theirs was the Kingdom is book II in what is commonly called the "God is an Englishmen" trilogy. Book I is the story of a guy who quits the army to seek his fortune and start a family at the dawn of the industrial revolution of Victorian England. Book II is the continuation of him and his large family, with each child now spawning a subthread. While modernism has dominated 20th century fiction, story tellers held their own as well. Englishman R F Delderfield specialized in the story-telling novel. Out of print for many years, his God is An Englishman is available once again. It is the first of a trilogy of books about Adam Swann, a soldier turned businessman in Victorian Britain.

This is such an interesting read....a little predictable at times, but also surprising and interesting.

My favorite part of the story is Adam's own heart for the downtrodden. As an army officer, he witnessed devastation to the civilian populations of the Crimea and India, which is a major reason why he decides to quit the army. (This isn't dwelt upon too much thankfully.) He is sensitive to the suffering of his fellow human beings, whether that be the factory hands in cotton mills or the street orphans in London. When Adam starts his business, his early employees are the street kids whom Saul Keate and his wife have been housing and feeding. He pays a fair wage and treats each man in his employ as a human being. He knows names, histories, and steps in himself when there is a problem or dispute. This certainly works well as a narrative device, but it's clear that Adam really cares. A major dispute and turning point between Adam and Henrietta comes about because of the suffering of a chimney sweep. The most notable of the events was when a mine collapsed, Swann's driver Bryan Lovell told the mine owner that a pump was in his yard that had been received three days early. He arranged for the pump to be used to save more than 50 lives of miners trapped in the cave. People didn't remember Lovell's name but they remembered that Swann had the pump because of their efficiency in having the pump three days ahead of schedule and allowing it to be used in saving so many lives. In a sense you are an outsider, my dear chap,' he said, 'and that's the reason I grabbed you the moment you showed up. You're the bridge, don't you see? A passage over a generation gap, and it isn't the conventional generation gap we all have to cross if we know our business properly. Your gap, caused by the war, is semi permanent. It might take twenty years to close.' Adam Swann is hungry for success. He is one of the new breed of entrepreneurs thrown up by the Industrial Revolution, determined to take advantage of current economic conditions to build an unrivalled business empire. And he is determined to win the beautiful, strong-minded Henrietta, and persuade her to share in his struggles and triumphs.

Delderfield's first published play was produced at Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1936; the Birmingham Post wrote "more please, Mr Delderfield". [2] :250 One of his plays, Worm's Eye View, had a run at the Whitehall Theatre in London, and was filmed in 1951 with Diana Dors. Following service in the RAF during World War II, he resumed his literary career, while also running an antiques business near Budleigh Salterton, Devon. Having begun with drama, Delderfield decided to switch to writing novels in the 1950s. His first novel, Seven Men of Gascony, a tale of French soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars, was published in 1949 by Werner Laurie. [3] In 1950 he featured in a BBC Newsreel clip of the short-lived The Axminster and Lyme Regis Clarion in Lyme Regis. [4] Autobiography [ edit ] And we get the love lives of all of the other older children as well. I find the most interesting to be those of Stella, the oldest daughter, and Giles, the third son. can't do it because we're even more adrift than they are and haven't a compass reading between us. In a year or so I daresay we can find you some help. Hang it all, everyone in his early twenties can't be dead or maimed or gassed. In the meantime you're on your own, lad.” In other words, what matters most for our churches is that we’re together in Christ, not that we’re together in England. He was still giving media interviews up to the last year of his life, when he died as a result of pulmonary fibrosis after a long illness. [1] His wife and editor, Myfanwy Horne (the daughter of journalist Ross Gollan), later completed his part-written manuscript, published as Dying: a memoir in 2007. [6] Honours and legacy [ edit ]

Rating

This is a feminist novel for the 1970’s: it has strong, capable women, but they are more than willing to subjugate themselves if they can only find a man who is yet stronger and more capable. While Adam and Henrietta’s relationship is less passionate than that of the Poldarks, it has some interesting twists. I thought their wedding night was very well written: Henrietta naive but determined, and both of them pleasantly surprised. The childbirth scene, not so much - not sure the author had ever actually talked to anybody who had given birth. Hughes, Robin (17 January 1992). "Australian Biography: Donald Horne". National Film and Sound Archive . Retrieved 20 February 2022. The Australian people: biography of a nation. Sydney, New South Wales: Angus and Robertson. 1972. p.285. ISBN 978-0-207-12845-5. The two-volume work The Avenue, which follows the residents of a middle-class suburban road over a few decades, begins shortly after the end of World War I with the return of one resident, who finds that his wife has died in the Spanish flu epidemic and left him with several children to care for. Donald Horne: As I lay dying". The Weekend Australian Magazine. 22 September 2007 . Retrieved 14 June 2013.

The great museum: the re-presentation of history. Leichhardt, New South Wales: Pluto Press. 1984. ISBN 978-0-86104-788-8.

He was, from the beginning of his studies at Balliol College, Oxford, drawn towards the 17th century. His first publication was an article in a 1940 collection, The English Revolution, 1640, which was a no-holds-barred assault on the traditional presentation of the civil war as an aberration in the stately continuity of English history. He would later downplay the essay as the work of an angry young man who expected to die in the war, but it marked the beginnings of his lifelong attempt to revive the energy, ideas, religiosity and politics of the 1600s for an educated 20th-century readership. Despite all the long stories involved, I do really like large multigenerational sagas. So far, this God is an Englishman Series is among the best I have ever read. He could not be sure whether his presence brought any real comfort but it must have eased Briarley's inner tensions to some extent for presently he said, 'I didn't see a great deal of him, sir. When I was a kid he was mostly in India or Ireland. He came here once, on leave. Last autumn, it was. We… we sat here for a bit, waiting for the school boneshaker to take him to the station.' Adam Swann and the young wife he as good as abducted seem at first like cardboard characters, Adam only a symbol of honorable and aggressive business enterprise, Henrietta only a symbol of innocence, ignorance and frivolity. But Mr. Delderfield is too sure a professional novelist to leave them in such‐ rudimentary con dition. As his sprawling tale marches briskly ahead Adam and Henrietta change and grow, becoming different, wiser and better people than they were when first introduced. One may not believe every surprising episode in “God Is an Eng lishman,” but one learns to be lieve in Adam and Henrietta. They are not notably interest ing or likable people; but they are real, and Adam in par ticular seems just the sort of self‐confident, intelligent gam bler who, no doubt, created many of the business empires of the last century.

Hard for me to rate this book. I loved the writing was great and the story of Adam Swann was outstanding, but I lost some interest as the author delved into other characters and dealt with issues and locales that I was not familiar with. But the story of Swann was really well done, loved how he found his wife, loved her eventual maturation and indispensability to the business. For being a family trilogy this book only covered about 10 years from 1856-66, so I am interested in how the will expand the future generations and how far into the future he will carry the story. I have the other two books of this series but will hold off on reading the remaining two books for a bit. Apparently I am behind schedule according to Goodreads and my 2016 reading goal. Much of the history in the book is well-researched and accurate, but there is also a touch of anachronism in some of the actions and attitudes that reflect more toward the time in which the book is being written than the time in which it is set. Several times I had to stop and think about whether I found certain elements believable in 1885 or whether they didn’t seem more akin to 1970. Sam Rawlinson had grown into a position of wealth and owned of a mill. His wife had died giving birth to Henrietta and he valued her as a possession to be used to gain more wealth. Henrietta was 18 and refused to be forced into a marriage in exchange for land. The striking mill workers had caused a riot and set the mill on fire. Henrietta used the distraction as an opportunity to run away from home. A storm came up and her horse threw her and ran off. She found a hut outside of town and used it to get out of the rain.

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National Living Treasures – Current List, Deceased, Formerly Listed, National Trust of Australia (NSW), 22 August 2014 I want to start off by saying that this book took me a week to read but I loved every minute of it. I read a few smaller books in between, but I just adored spending so much time in Victorian England. I felt like I lived in Adam and Henrietta’s world and could understand their issues and problems but also cheer for them to push forward, move past whatever problems they were having, and succeed at everything. This is the kind of book that becomes a favorite, at least for me, because I love huge complex stories like this.