"The Heir to Starvelings", Evelyn Berckman

This was billed as 'a Gothic novel' and I suppose it is. The main protagonist is a young woman who has just lost her fiancé in the Crimean War, and who is seeking to distract herself with a suitably exhausting labour; the one she takes on is the education and civilisation of a feral small boy, who happens to be the neglected heir of a horrible old aristocrat living in a crumbling and sinister mansion surrounded by overgrown woods to which local superstition attributes monsters (or at least vicious guard-dogs). Lord Stanyon was once a dissolute Regency buck, who in his crippled old age has defied his family by marrying an uneducated peasant and producing a son to spite his heirs-presumptive, but the boy --thanks as much to the equally evil manservant's malignity as to his father's scorn for his wife and child-- is not only filthy and illiterate, but half-deaf and backward in his development as a result.( Read more... )