Radio Among The Victorians

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 71, 1 November 1940, Page 17

Radio Among The Victorians

Mrs. Craik Comes To Life Again

(By

C. R.

ALLEN

T is probable that Mrs. Craik believed in a resurrection of some sort, but she would scarcely have envisaged such a resurrection as has overtaken her novel "Olive" which is now running as a radio serial under the title of "The Hunchback of Ben Ali." She was one of those indefatigable drivers of the pen in Victorian days who just missed a place in G. K. Chesterton’s gallery. Of such were Charlotte Yonge and Mrs. Hemans. Born Dinah Maria Mullock at Stoke-on-Trent in 1829, she began as a cones tributor to fashion books in order to support an ailing mother and two young brothers. Then she turned her attention to a full-length novel, "The Ogilvies," which was published in 1849. Then came "Olive" which was to enjoy the resurrection referred to above. " John Halifax, Gentleman," followed, and this work established her in the hearts of contemporary readers, and was to win her friends, young and old, down the years until the present time. It, also, has been heard as a radio serial. In 1865 she married Mr. George Lillie Craik, a publisher, and went to live in Kent, where she died in 1887. Her heart was in the West Country, however, and a memorial was set up to her memory in Tewksbury Abbey. In "Home," Alan Mulgan relates how he stood before the memorial to Jane Austen at Winchester and subconsciously saluted the genius of that country parson’s daughter. At Tewksbury Abbey, if one does not feel oneself in the presence of a memorial to genuis, one does at least feel that, in John Halifax, the cripple boy of Tewksbury, Mrs. Craik gave to the world one of those characters which will always hold a place in the affections of English readers. "Olive" is richer in incident than is the leisurely story of John Halifax; but it is to the latter that one instinctively turns, since it was here that Mrs. Craik enshrined for all time a certain phase of life in the West Country, Mrs. Craik belonged to the second flight. She wrote a considerable amount of poetry, but little, if any, of it has survived. She also wrote a number of stories for children, though the names of these are all forgotten, while "Anna, the Orphan of Waterloo," lives on in the memory of a generation that’ has forgotten its author. ' As one listens to the story of the Hunchback of Ben Ali one may call to mind the picture of this good Victorian woman as Mrs. Oliphant drew her in a word picture for " Macmillan’s Magazine." It was her delight to point a moral and adorn a tale; but she employed a certain amount of subtlety in ‘pointing her moral,