Run To Earth by M. E. Braddon

 

‘Run to Earth’ is a 1868 novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, first published as a serial in The London Journal in 1866.

The action of the story starts sometime around 1839, twenty-seven years in the past. This would be in the very early years of Queen Victoria’s reign so the influence of the story is still very much Georgian.

The first few chapters are concerned with the robbery and murder of a stubbornly naive, but well intentioned merchant Captain named Valentine Jernam. The identity of the killers and motive for the murder are known to the reader from the beginning, but the rest of the book is ultimately about the consequences of the murder on one character in particular, the primary protagonist, Honoria.

The second major plot in the story is the disinheritance of Sir Oswald Eversleigh’s evil nephew, Reginald Eversleigh and his attempts to get his hands on his uncle’s fortune. That’s the easiest way that I can simplify the overall story, as there are several minor interconnected subplots which require a bit of suspension of disbelief to ignore all of the unlikely coincidences. Having said that, like most of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s works including her famous, ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’, ‘Run to Earth’ is very easy to read and I found it quite difficult to put down. I think this is one of my favourite out of Braddon’s works even though what happens to some of the innocent characters is so unfair!

There is a large cast of characters whose adventures and misadventures include rags to riches, kidnapping, elopement, murders, rumours of ghosts, a dreary castle, broken hearts, suicides, revenge and most of the other aspects of gothic fiction.

Partial List of Characters

Primary Characters

• Honoria, Lady Eversleigh: protagonist, a very unfortunate young woman.
• Thomas “Black” Milsom: antagonist, one of the most evil characters in the book. A murderer, thief and so much more.
• Reginald Eversleigh: antagonist, a wastrel who never acknowledges that his downfall is due to his own evil actions
• Victor Carrington: antagonist, a surgeon and murderer who helps Reginald for reasons of his own.

Secondary Characters

• Valentine Jernam: the man whose murder started off the chain of events and revelations described in the plot.
• George Jernam: Valentine’s younger and devoted brother.
• Joyce Harker: a clerk devoted to finding out what happened to Captain Valentine.
• Sir Oswald Eversleigh: a man unfortunate enough to be Reginald’s paternal uncle.
• Douglas Dale: Sir Oswald’s maternal nephew and Reginald’s cousin.
• Andrew Larkspur: a former Bow Street runner investigating various crimes in the story.
• Dennis Wayman: Black Milsom’s best friend and partner in crime.

Throughout the novel many aspects of life at the time of the story are mentioned, for example the transportation of criminals to penal colonies outside of the British Isles is mentioned when referring to Van Demien’s Island, now known as Tasmania, an island state of Australia. Other parts of the British Empire are also referred to such as Barbados, the island where my family is from!

Overall this book is much more socially aware of the life of people in the lower classes, than the works of the earlier Jane Austen whose most famous works all ignored lower class people completely. I think the difference comes from the social status of the authors and their target audiences. Jane Austen was a member of the landed gentry just like the characters she wrote about and her target audience. Mary Elizabeth Braddon on the other hand was a member of the educated middle class, her father was a solicitor, and her audience was the newly literate lower classes. Her works were published in serial form in magazines which cost a penny (one pence). The kind of magazines Braddon was publishing in are known more popularly as, "penny dreadfuls" because they were both cheap and sensationalist.

It seems quite a shame that this book is not more popular or more discussed. I would certainly recommend it to anyone who enjoys the kind of fiction published in penny magazines in the Victorian era and maybe to people who like Charles Dickens and the later Catherine Cookson (although the genre is not exactly the same). It can be read for free at Project Gutenberg and is also available elsewhere as an ebook.

Have you read Run to Earth before? If so what did you think of the story? Let me know in the comments below: