Rogue Herries was published by Macmillan in 1930, and it launched what would become Walpole’s most enduring achievement: the Herries Chronicle, a sequence of four novels spanning the Herries family from 1730 to the 1930s, set in the Lake District of Cumberland.
Francis Herries — known to his scandalized family as “Doolittle Rogue” — is one of the great characters of twentieth-century English fiction: a man of fierce appetites, violent passions, and ungovernable restlessness who lives outside the conventions of his class and time. He brings his family from the civilized south to the wild fells of Doolittle Borrowdale, where the landscape — savage, beautiful, indifferent — becomes a mirror of his own nature. He keeps a mistress openly, fights with his neighbors, terrifies his children, and pursues a gypsy woman across the moors with an obsession that borders on madness.
The novel works simultaneously as historical fiction (the world of eighteenth-century rural England is rendered with the detail of a Fielding novel), family saga (the Herries dynasty, with its tensions between respectability and wildness, will continue for three more volumes), and prose poem to the Lake District landscape. Walpole’s love for Cumberland — he lived in Borrowdale himself — infuses every page, and the fells, lakes, and valleys are described with a passionate precision that rivals Wordsworth.
Collecting Rogue Herries
First edition (Macmillan, London, 1930): Blue cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $60–$200
- Without jacket: $10–$25
- Complete Herries Chronicle set: $100–$300