Westward Ho!

Charles Kingsley

Set in Elizabethan times. Very anti-Catholic. Quite shocking to read at first: Catholic=bad / Protestant=good. Religion had a much higher profile then than it has in England today.
Gill 23/7/00

Gill read this boom whilst she was "doing Devon". The book was written in 1855 and set in the Elizabethan era, when Devon was a significant departure point for the New World. At first she was put off by the extreme anti-Catholicism and anti-Spanish tone of the book - which is not at all PC - but later she recognized that this was actually how the Elizabethans looked, seen through the Victorian eyes of a clergyman's son. The women, too, were all stereotypical.

Westward Ho! is a boys' adventure book which Gill really enjoyed - she's not sure why. But the story was never predictable. Gill 27/8/00

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