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[Originally serialized in The Century Magazine in 12 parts, Nov. 1896-Oct. 1897. At least nineteen editions in novel form were published prior to World War I, with periodic reissues since then. It came out again in paperback last year. The text is available online from Project Gutenberg.]

I discovered this dusty old charmer when an artist friend showed me a painting of John André by Brandywine School illustrator Howard Pyle. In fact Pyle did a whole series of illos for the story when it was serialized in The Century Magazine, which -- since he was one of the top magazine illustrators of the day -- suggests that Mitchell was far better known at the time than he is now.

Narrated in first person, it is the reminiscences of Hugh Wynne in his old age, writing about the hot-blooded days of his youth, from boyhood through the years of the Revolution. When I was checking to see if the novel was available online (it is), I stumbled over a contemporary review, published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1897, which agrees so bang-on with my major impressions that I'll let that long-gone reviewer make a few comments:

There is a peculiarly happy, mellow quality in Dr. S. Weir Mitchell's latest novel, Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker[...]. It purports to be the memoirs of its chief character, written many years after the events he describes, and the sense of old age is admirably conveyed. Even in descriptions of the thick of the mêlée at Germantown, or of the charge over the redoubts at Yorktown, one is conscious of the flow of the tranquil pen of the narrator rather than of the waving sword of the actor. It is much as if the old Quaker virus, temporarily neutralized by the hot blood of youth, were once more in the ascendant; and though we have endless incidents, duels, battles, captures, escapes, plots, and counterplots, there is never the sense of excitement, scarcely of suspense, that such a succession of incidents presupposes.¹

Or, to put it another way, it's a very lazy book, in no great hurry to get anywhere, though the pleasant narrative style carries the reader along. Far more of it focuses on Hugh's strained relationship with his father, his feud with his Welsh cousin, and his lackadaisical courtship of a Tory belle named Darthea -- though quite honestly he seems more interested in his good friend Jack's "golden beauty" than hers -- than either his military career or his unwitting involvement in the Arnold/André plot. Pretty much everyone from Ban Tarleton to Caty Greene drifts past in cameos, but the major players are original characters. As the Atlantic reviewer noted, most of the plot twists are more than predictable, and there isn't much chance that the reader will get into a dither, worrying about what comes next.

I enjoyed it well enough, though it isn't the sort of story to generate a strong response, either pro or con. Its most memorable features are the Pyle illustrations, though of course they were printed in half-tones in the magazine publication. The original paintings are currently in the collection of the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, PA. Unfortunately, they tend to have only one on display at a time in their "American Illustration" gallery.

Notes:

¹ "Notable Recent Novels" column, The Atlantic Monthly, 80 (1897): 854-5. Amusingly, the review which follows it is for Kipling's Captains Courageous. [ back ]