Hester Burton Quotes

Set in early nineteenth century England, it addresses the themes of social reform and freedom of speech in a time of war.

There was every reason for Margaret Pargeter, just seventeen, to be happy that unlucky day in the summer of 1801. The war with France seemed far away and even her uneasy fears for her bookseller father.

The setting is 1801, in a small dark bookshop on Holly Lane, in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral. It is the home of Margaret Pargeter and smells of old leather bindings, parchment and ink.

A tide of anger against social conditions is unleashed, which means trouble for the Pargeter family.

Her father’s books and his bookselling are her life - or so they were until one day disaster strikes Holly Lane.

The daughter of a bookseller has to cope when he is imprisoned under the draconian and repressive libel laws of the early 1900s. We learn a lot about those laws, and about the changing class structure at the beginning of century.

The war with France seemed far away and even her uneasy fears for her bookseller father, who sometimes criticized too openly the desperate lot of London’s poor, seemed secondary to her growing interest in handsome Robert Kerridge, a young medical student, who lived with them in Holly Lane.

Then disaster - for that night a foul-smelling nearby tenement collapsed in an appalling ruin of neglect, and Mr. Pargeter, subsequently imprisoned for publishing a fiery protest against such conditions, was twice found guilty of sedition.

Worse yet, the very people whose cause he had championed turned against him, sacking and burning the bookshop.

And Margaret, left homeless, resentful, and yet for the first time in love, was faced with the double responsibility of making a new home in a remote Suffolk town and proving herself worthy of Robert’s affection.