What has Roger really been up to?

 Something I'm going to do if I ever have the time to devote to such a major task is compile a definitive chronology of the Johnny Ludlow stories written by Mrs Henry Wood. Originally published anonymously in Argosy magazine (which Mrs Wood edited and wrote a lot of the content of), "Johnny Ludlow's papers" are entertaining supposedly-autobiographical stories of things Johnny did in his younger days. They aren't written in chronological order, dotting about between different periods in his life at random, and he often doesn't specify when they happened, leaving the reader to make an educated guess as to whether we're reading a story about a young boy or a grown man.

Exactly when the stories take place is also vague, but we can pin them down for the most part - it's clear that Johnny is somewhat younger than Mrs Wood (some people suggested he's based on her son, but by all accounts Charles Wood was much more of a wuss than even the wimpy 'muff' Johnny Ludlow and never had an interesting adventure in his life). The key chronological marker on which the sequence of events can be hung is the fourth published story, "Watching on St. Mark's Eve", from April 1868.

A key plot point of that story is that St. Mark's Eve, April 24th, falls on Easter Monday. The only time that happened in the 19th century was 1848, so we can fix that one (in which Johnny is somewhere around sixteen years old) in the calendar and place the other stories around it. It works surprisingly well, in fact - all through the twenty years these papers were being written, the historical references all fit very neatly with the right years of the 1840s and 1850s without needing to be stretched in any kind of implausible way... except just once.

One of the last series of stories (sadly, the later ones do decline in quality a little) to appear in the Argosy is the three-part "Roger Bevere" saga (January-March 1884). With this one we return to the eventful trip to London Johnny made around the time of his twenty-first birthday, and pick up on his previous passing mentions to the black sheep of Johnny's guardian Mr Brandon's family, his nephew Roger.

Roger is a medical student in London, and London as seen through the eyes of Johnny Ludlow and Mrs Henry Wood is a terrible place for a young man to be. Temptation was everywhere. Sin was lurking around every corner. Mrs Wood was from Worcestershire, and had a deep distrust of the big city, which comes out more and more strongly in her writings as she gets older.

Johnny finally tracks down Roger in a part of London known as "the Bell-and-Clapper", named after a very noisy church of not at all the type that Johnny approves of. It's also next to an underground railway station, and its refreshment-room full of enticing bottles and staffed by women with strong-minded manners and "monstrous heads of hair". And it turns out Roger Bevere has been ensnared by the terrible attractions of this place in a way beyond Johnny's wildest fears! The respectable young man has MARRIED a loud, vulgar woman named Lizzie, whom he met when she was working at the refreshment-room bar!

But there's a problem with this, from the point of view of a chronologist. The Bell-and Clapper is fictitious, but Roger has been travelling from there to St Bartholomew's Hospital on the underground railway, and that's a real place - it's right by Farringdon station, the terminus of the first underground line... which opened in 1863.

The underground isn't even presented as a new thing in this story - it's well-established and has clearly been around for a good long while. The whole setting, in fact, doesn't feel at all like the London of the 1850s (which it should be when Johnny Ludlow is 21, unless all the other stories are wrong), but feels very like the bustling, modern London of 1884.

Lizzie is a very modern young lady. She drinks, laughs, disregards her husband's orders, makes a lot of noise and horrifies respectable people like Roger Bevere, who thoroughly regrets what he's done and desperately wants to keep it a secret from his family. A discussion between Johnny and Dr Pitt (who first appeared in the Johnny Ludlow stories as an outright villain, but subsequently turned out not to be responsible for the worst of it after all, and to have since stopped drinking and become a more decent person) digresses into great detail about how these underground railway refreshment rooms lead good young men into the devil's clutches and are responsible for corrupting good young women too.

I feel I should point out that this extensive moralising is balanced by a lot of wonderful humour, creativity and even occasional radical tendencies in Mrs Henry Wood's writings - please don't be put off trying them by reading a passage like this one!

And perhaps this is the reason for the chronological confusion. I think Johnny is editorialising - he's unhappy with the modern profusion of drinking places and loose women, and is taking this story as an opportunity to write about their evils at length! It also allows him to justify Roger Bevere's terrible marriage, giving his sort-of-relative an excuse that perhaps he didn't have in reality!

Because there's something else strange about this marriage. The reason for a marriage between someone like Roger and a woman in Lizzie's station of life was usually a baby, let's be honest here. But there's no mention of that (apart from a couple of coy hints from narrator Johnny that sometimes something else might happen in this kind of morally deficient place). Roger and Lizzie have been married for some eighteen months when Johnny catches up with him, but they seem to be sleeping in separate rooms and to all appearances have always done so.

 There's surely something Johnny is too discreet to tell us here (not that illegitimate births are unheard-of in Johnny Ludlow's papers, even in decent rural Worcestershire, but remember that Roger is Mr Brandon's nephew!). I think poor Roger Bevere was a worse man than Johnny wants to admit. He fell into bad ways before there was a supply of alcohol and attractive women at every underground station, got some loose woman in a scrape, got married and had to keep it a secret.

If we look at how the situation resolves itself, we can see where Johnny's sympathies lie. Two and a half years later, Johnny and Mr Brandon go for Christmas to Roger's mother (and Mr Brandon's sister) Lady Bevere and the rest of the family. Roger is more miserable than ever, still keeping his marriage a secret, and living apart from Lizzie, who's not been a day sober for the last two years. It emerges, funnily enough, that Lizzie is the sister of one of Lady Bevere's servants, unknown to any of them (Lizzie is under the impression that her surname is written as it's pronounced, 'Bevary', and has only seen 'Bevere' written down in a letter from her sister and thought it a different name entirely, pronounced 'Beveer') and Lizzie has come down to Essex to see her, not knowing that Roger is there.

Everything is sure to come out, and Roger and Johnny are waiting in terror for her to arrive and make the situation known. The suspense nearly kills Roger, but it turns into a happy ending after all - Lizzie gets lost walking in the snow, with a bottle of brandy, and dies in a ditch. Roger never has to tell anyone his dark secret, and can now "pull up" from his bad ways and become a decent member of society again. He does have the decency to secretly pay for Lizzie's burial expenses, at least. The ending sums up the relief the reader is expected to feel for the poor man:

I think a modern reader is less touched by Roger's narrow escape from the horrors of 'exposure' and more inclined to wonder just how dark the skeleton in Mr Brandon's closet really was. Merry Christmas to one and all!