The year 1892, it will be remembered, was the first year of American copyright: and the great success of David Grieve in America, following on the extraordinary vogue there of Robert Elsmere, in its pirated editions, brought me largely increased literary receipts. It seemed that I was not destined, after all, to "ruin my publishers," as I had despondently foretold in a letter to my husband before the appearance of Robert Elsmere; but that, with regular work, I might look forward to a fairly steady income. We therefore felt justified in seizing an opportunity brought to our notice by an old friend who lived in the neighborhood, and migrating to a house north of London, in the real heart of Middle England. After leaving Borough Farm, we had built a house on a hill near Haslemere, looking south over the blue and purple Weald; but two years' residence had convinced me that Surrey was almost as populous as London, and that real solitude for literary work was not to be found there--at any rate, in that corner of it where we had chosen to build, and, also, while we were nursing our newly planted shrubberies of baby pines and rhododendrons, there was always in my mind, as I find from letters of the time, a discontented yearning for "an old house and old trees"! We found both at Stocks, whither we migrated in the summer of 1892. The little estate had then been recently inherited by Mrs. Grey, mother of Sir Edward Grey, now Lord Grey of Falloden. We were at first tenants of the house and grounds, but in 1896 we bought the small property from the Greys, and have now been for more than twenty years its happy possessors. The house lies on a high upland, under one of the last easterly spurs of the Chilterns. It was built in 1780 (we rebuilt it in 1908) in succession to a much older house of which a few fragments remain, and the village at its gates had changed hardly at all in the hundred years which preceded our arrival. A few new cottages had been built; more needed to be built; and two residents, intimately connected with the past of the village, had built houses just outside it. But villadom did not exist. The village was rich in old folk, in whom were stored the memories and traditions of its quiet past. The postmaster, "Johnny Dolt," who was nearing his eighties, was the universal referee on all local questions--rights of way, boundaries, village customs, and the like; and of some of the old women of the village, as they were twenty-five years ago, I have drawn as faithful a picture as I could in one or two chapters of Marcella.
But the new novel owed not only much of its scenery and setting, but also its main incident, to the new house. We first entered into negotiation for Stocks in January, 1892. In the preceding December two gamekeepers had been murdered on the Stocks property, in a field under a big wood, not three hundred yards from the house; and naturally the little community, as it lay in its rural quiet beneath its wooded hills, was still, when we first entered it, under the shock and excitement of the tragedy. We heard all the story on the spot, and then viewed it from another point of view--the sociopolitical--when we went down from London to stay at one of the neighboring country-houses, in February; and found the Home Secretary, Mr. Matthews, afterward Lord Llandaff, among the guests. The trial was over, the verdict given, and the two murderers were under sentence of death. But there was a strong agitation going on in favor of a reprieve; and what made the discussion of it, in this country-house party, particularly piquant was that the case, at that very moment, was a matter of close consultation between the judge and the Home Secretary. It was not easy, therefore, to talk of it in Mr. Matthews's presence. Voices dropped and groups dissolved when he appeared. Mr. Asquith, who succeeded Mr. Matthews that very year as Home Secretary, was also, if I remember right, of the party; and there was a good deal of rather hot discussion of the game laws, and of English landlordism in general.
With these things in my mind, as soon as we had settled into Stocks, I began to think of Marcella. I wrote the sketch of the book in September, 1892, and finished it in February, 1894. Many things went to the making of it--not only the murdered keepers and the village talk, not only the remembered beauty of Hampden which gave me the main setting of the story, but a general ferment of mind, connected with much else that had been happening to me.
For the New Brotherhood of Robert Elsmere had become in some sort a realized dream; so far as any dream can ever take to itself the practical garments of this puzzling world. To show that the faith of Green and Martineau and Stopford Brooke was a faith that would wear and work--to provide a home for the new learning of a New Reformation, and a practical outlet for its enthusiasm of humanity--were the chief aims in the minds of those of us who in 1890 founded the University Hall Settlement in London. I look back now with emotion on that astonishing experiment. [ . . . ]
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