Deerbrook

________________________________________________________________________ Harriet Martineau was the daughter of a Norwich textile manufacturer of Huguenot descent--hence the name and trade. In 1829 the bank in which she, her mother and her sisters, had placed their money, failed and she was forced to earn a living through writing, at which she was very talented, particularly on political issues, such as the poverty facing a family on the death of the wage-earner. In 1839, after her travels in America, she wrote two long novels, of which Deerbrook was one, and a book about Toussaint L'Ouverture the other. This book, therefore gives great insight into the lives of upper middle class families of the mid nineteenth century. No one in families these days talks to the rest of the family in the polite, perhaps over-polite, terms used in this book. For this reason, though it was not meant to be taken as such, this book is a true social document. ________________________________________________________________________ DEERBROOK, BY HARRIET MARTINEAU. CHAPTER ONE. AN EVENT. Every town-bred person who travels in a rich country region, knows what it is to see a neat white house planted in a pretty situation,--in a shrubbery, or commanding a sunny common, or nestling between two hills,--and to say to himself, as the carriage sweeps past its gate, "I should like to live there,"--"I could be very happy in that pretty place." Transient visions pass before his mind's eye of dewy summer mornings, when the shadows are long on the grass, and of bright autumn afternoons, when it would be luxury to saunter in the neighbouring lanes; and of frosty winter days, when the sun shines in over the laurustinus at the window, while the fire burns with a different light from that which it gives in the dull parlours of a city.…