The story is deceptively simple: the entanglement of two families in a northern town called Aldworth. One, the Lockwoods, wealthy and powerful, in a position to patronise and help the second family, the poor Hunters, who have been left fatherless with a weak, ineffectual mother. Though the thudding heart of the story draws the reader inexorably along, hoping for the meek to conquer the strong, it … it is a surprising book in many ways, not least for its subversive portrayal of family – the children are often the adults, the parents the untrustworthy, unwise ones, and Whipple makes it clear that what we call today the nuclear family is not the answer to happiness. But what may be most satisfying about the book is how the climax is reached as a result of character.This is twentieth-century British fiction at its very best.
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I declared myself a Dorothy Whipple fan after reading Someone at a Distance. It’s taken me longer than I hoped to read another and Because of the Lockwoods didn’t disappoint.
I was drawn into the plight of the Hunter family from the opening pages – even though widowed Mrs Hunter is an utterly pathetic creature and, frankly, as much a cause of her family’s problems as William Lockwood is. Two of her three offspring are equally uninspiring – the older daughter, Molly, put upon until she finds fulfilment in running her own cake shop, and Martin who is a spineless drip.
But the youngest member of the family, I rooted for all the way. Thea, is more intelligent than her siblings, feisty, angry, disillusioned and even publicly disgraced, hers was a journey of self-discovery, raw and honest.
I also loved Oliver Reade, the rough market trader who embarks on a mission of self improvement because of his desperate and unrequited love for Thea. The classic self-made man, determined to rub away his own rough edges to win her respect and ultimately her love, I was rooting for him too.
The middle of the novel is set in provincial France, where Thea discovers first love, and, unlike the Lockwood sisters, adapts well and for the first time in her life comes into her own – only for her hopes and dreams to be dashed.
The Lockwoods are the promoters of Thea’s undoing. Or so it seems. And even though, from the opening pages, we have a sense of where this will end up, there is no diminishing of the satisfaction we get as the book moves towards its inevitable conclusion.
Through it all, there is the perfectly drawn backdrop of a small Lancashire cotton town, with the deep fissures that divide the classes – and which in the opening pages show us the terrible tumbling down of the Hunter family, impoverished by the untimely death of Mr Hunter, an architect. Whipple perfectly observes the complex layers of this classic British class structure from the mill-owning Harveys, through the social climbing Lockwoods, the brought low Hunters and, clawing his way up from the bottom, Oliver Reade and his family.
Houses play a crucial role in bringing this alive on the page. The Hunters move from Hill House with their Louis Quinze furniture to the cracked grates and miserable back yard of Byron Place, where Mrs Hunter is too mortified to speak to the neighbours, preferring the hideously patronising Mrs Lockwood, despite the nasty worn-out blouses her patron hands down to her like Lady Bountiful. On the other side of Byron Place, the Reades are moving in the opposite direction – from their humble origins in the vividly named Gas Street – via Mill Lane. And behind the gate and long driveway, the Lockwoods dwell in Oakfield, looking down on everyone except the Harveys in their even grander dwelling.
France offers a different source of divisions. There, the snobbery between people is no less evident – with Madame Farnet in her glass “tube”, Madame Blanchot in her patisserie, watching everything and missing nothing and the Directrice in her small stark office. In provincial France it is a straitened morality, a code of behaviour that dictates young women do not walk alone even through the small town, let alone venture into the woods outside it.
The book was published in 1949 but there is no indication of the date it was written or the year it portrays. I was constantly looking for clues as to whether it was pre or post war. eventually I decided Whipple must have been writing during the war – and like us now in the grip of a pandemic – unwilling to let it venture onto the pages. Whether pre or post war, the pages ripple with the changing nature of society, socially, economically and morally. It is a book written on the cusp of an era. And I loved it.
Dorothy Whipple was a fabulous mid-20th-century author of what today would be called women’s fiction. She deserves to have a wider readership today than she does…perhaps that day will come. There is something Jane Austen-ish about her observations of family and community life.
“Because of the Lockwoods” is a drama about two families in a factory town in the north of England. The Hunters were prosperous until the architect-father dies, leaving them near-destitute. The Lockwoods are neighbors of the Hunters and Mr. Lockwood, a lawyer, steps in to “help” the weak-spined widow settle her financial affairs. In the process he swindles her in a seemingly minor way, but the consequences reverberate throughout the novel as protagonist Thea Hunter grows up with a strong sense of justice. Thea is the youngest Hunter, but the only one with a backbone. She was a heroine I could root for. If you like coming-of-age stories and novels dealing with rigid class distinctions in early-20th-century English society, I highly recommend “Because of the Lockwoods.”