Another local novel, found. A rip-roaring historical adventure novel, set in Staffordshire and the Moorlands in the time of the highwaymen and the Jacobite invasion of England in 1745. George Wooley Gough’s The Yeoman Adventurer was published by Putnams in 1917.

The hero is a young self-educated farmer of Staffordshire, who reads the classics and is a keen angler. Apparently fishing features several times in the book, as the author was an angler, and the book opens with an epic battle with a Staffordshire pike. The Spectator review felt the hero to be rather too worthy to be truly enjoyable, and that many of the other characters were rather stereotyped. But the reviewer approvingly noted the brisk modern language used in the book, in contrast to the creaking thee’s and thou’s and wherefore’s usually found in historical novels of the period.

The author (1869-1943) was the son of a Stafford railway worker. Inspired by reading Adam Smith in his youth, he went on to Oxford to study History. He became a Free Trade economist by day, and a historical novelist in the evenings. Born in Stafford town, as a boy of 12 the 1881 Census finds him living at “12 Mill Bank, St. Mary, Stafford”.

“The most stirring and fascinating romance of recent years” (The Daily Graphic, of The Yeoman Adventurer). A New Zealand soldier’s First World War diary entry recorded of The Yeoman Adventurer, “a fine book – one of the best I’ve had lately.”

There’s also a Project Gutenberg edition online, which might be an easier read on the Kindle than the Archive.org version.

He followed this with a sort of 18th century Sherlock Holmes, in The Terror by Night (1923). ‘The Terror’ is an 18th century highwayman/crime-fighter, who sets out in a series of episodes to right various local wrongs and to solve various mysteries. I would assume a Staffordshire setting, but the details are unavailable. This “series of stories that should carry him into the front rank of contemporary novelists” said The Lloyd George Liberal Magazine, to which Gough contributed economics articles. But The Spectator reviewer was less gushing, with “A good example of the period novel with no pretensions beyond amusement”.

Later came the novels My Lady Vamp (1926), and Daughter of Kings (1930). There are no details of these online, but by the sound of the titles they’re likely to be historical novels. It would be interesting to know if the ‘Vamp’ indicates some supernatural vampire element.