[Westward Ho! and Constance Herbert]

Charles Kingsley's Westward Ho!(1855) was reviewed twice by George Eliot. The first review, finished on 9 May 1855 according to her Journal, appeared in the Leader, 19 May 1855, pp. 474-475. Half of it consists of extracts from the novel, and in her own comment George Eliot is nicely balanced between praise and disapproval. She concludes that:

the preacher overcomes the painter often, which, though creditable to the writer's earnestness and honesty, injures his work as a mere work of art. It is as if a painter in colour were to write 'Oh, you villain!' under his Jesuits or murderers; or to have a strip flowing from a hero's mouth, with 'Imitate me, my man!' on it. No doubt the villain is to be hated, and the hero loved; but we ought to see that sufficiently in the figures of them. We don't want a man with a wand, going about the gallery and haranguing us. Art is art, and tells its own story. We do not think Westward Ho! equal, for instance, to Thackeray's Esmond, where the illusion of living in a past age is so delightfully kept up. This is our only literary objection to the book; it by no means prevents our most fully recognising the manly earnestness, the glowing vivacity, the hearty humanity, the glorious bits of vivid painting.