Dead - and never called me Mother: Mrs Henry Wood of Worcester

by John Stafford

'Dead - and never called me Mother.' Many will recognise the words, and a few will think of East Lynne by Mrs Henry Wood. The best-selling author of the post-Dickens period, she pleased critics and ordinary readers alike with shocking thrillers, tales of families in hardship, and expertly-woven short stories.

She was born Ellen Price in 1814, in the shadow of Worcester Cathedral. Her father owned a glove works, then the staple industry of the city. He was scholarly by nature and highly regarded by the Cathedral clergy. He appears in one of Ellen's novels - as Thomas Ashley in Mrs Halliburton's Troubles. Ellen had a remarkably good memory and stored away the history she read, the stories her grandmother told, and the gossip she heard. Her writings are full of the characters and places of Worcester, where she spent her childhood and youth.

She married Henry Wood, a banker, shipper and consular agent when she was 22 and spent the next twenty years abroad, beginning to contribute stories to two magazines for very little payment. Her first novel, Danesbury House, was written in 28 days, after she had returned to England and settled in Norwood. It won the substantial prize of œ100 from the Scottish Temperance League, and made her name well-known. When East Lynne appeared as a serial in New Monthly Magazine it was praised for its dramatic power, but the novel as a book was rejected twice before finding a publisher. Then an enthusiastic review in the Times launched such an unprecedented demand that the printers had to work night and day to keep up with the orders. She followed her success with two novels which were less melodramatic and full of local colour, remembered from her youth in Worcester. These three together sold a million copies, and one or two new novels were published every year.

When Henry Wood died in 1866, Ellen moved to her final home in St John's Wood and bought the Argosy, a fiction magazine which had fallen into disrepute. Through the next few years, the magazine was sustained by her own writings, those of her son Charles, and short pieces by Johnny Ludlow, whose first person stories were supposed to be written by a young squire. It was not until 1879 that Ellen, to recover respect she had lost by writing anonymous anti-union propaganda, admitted writing the Johnny Ludlow stories herself. They contain little of the sentimental religion and overt moralising which marred her novels for some critics, and still stand today as excellent examples of the short story.

Ellen suffered all her life from curvature of the spine, so that she wrote much of her work lying down with her book on her knees. Heart failure was the cause of her death in 1887, and she is commemorated by her a tomb in Highgate Cemetery, and a memorial in Worcester Cathedral.

The famous quotation does not in fact appear in any of Mrs Henry Wood's books. It is one of the many stage melodramas based on East Lynne which gives us the remembered line 'Dead - and never called me Mother.'

Copyright (c) John Stafford 1997



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