Wolves Chronicles – She Reads Novels

This week Chris of Calmgrove and Lizzie Ross are hosting their annual Witch Week, an event inspired by the Diana Wynne Jones book, Witch Week, and this year they are celebrating the work of Joan Aiken. I’ve had the second book in Aiken’s Wolves Chronicles series on my TBR since reading the first, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, last year and this seemed like a perfect opportunity to pick it up.

Black Hearts in Battersea was first published in 1964 and while I would recommend reading The Wolves of Willoughby Chase first, you don’t really need to as this book would also work as a standalone story. It begins with Simon (the boy we first met living in a cave in the woods near Willoughby Chase) searching the streets of London for his friend, Dr Field. Simon is hoping to study at the Art Academy in Chelsea and Dr Field has invited him to share his lodgings in Rose Alley. However, Rose Alley proves very difficult to find, and when Simon does eventually stumble upon the right address he discovers there’s no trace of the doctor – the house is inhabited by the rather unpleasant Mr and Mrs Twite and their daughter, Dido, ‘a shrewish looking little creature of perhaps eight or nine’.

What has happened to Dr Field and will Simon manage to track him down? This is only one small part of this imaginative, action-packed novel which, like the previous book, is obviously intended for a younger audience but is still an entertaining read for those of us who are older. There are missing children and mistaken identities, kidnappings, shipwrecks and balloon rides, and a plot to kill the King – the King in this case being James III as we are in an alternate history where the Stuarts are still on the throne in the early 19th century and are the target of Hanoverian conspiracies. The other significant difference between this fictional world and the real one is that a large number of wolves have crossed from Europe into Britain and although we didn’t see much of them in Willoughby Chase, they do get alarmingly close to Simon and his friends on several occasions in this book!

Black Hearts in Battersea feels almost like a Charles Dickens novel for children, with the 19th century London setting and the array of larger-than-life characters – who include Dido and the Twite family, the eccentric Duke of Battersea, the excitable Dr Furneaux, who runs the academy Simon attends, and the book’s main villain, Eustace Buckle. I wish I had read this as a child, but as an adult I still found it a lot of fun and I’m sure I’ll read the next book in the series at some point, particularly as this one ends with Dido’s whereabouts unknown!

Book 49/50 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024

I’ve read and enjoyed several of Joan Aiken’s adult novels over the last few years – my favourite so far is Castle Barebane – but until now I’ve never read the book for which she’s most famous, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. It was first published in 1962, which makes it a perfect choice for this week’s 1962 Club hosted by Simon and Karen.

This is obviously a book aimed at younger readers and I’m sure I would have loved it if I’d read it as a child; however, I was pleased to find that it also has a lot to offer an adult reader. I’m definitely planning to continue with the next book in the series.

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase is set in England in an alternate history where the Stuarts are still on the throne in the 19th century. It’s 1832, early in the reign of King James III, and a tunnel between Dover and Calais has recently been completed, allowing the migration of a large number of wolves from Europe. In reality, of course, the Channel Tunnel wouldn’t open until 1994, so Joan Aiken really was ahead of her time – although obviously the idea had existed in theory for much longer! Other than the tunnel and the presence of wolves, the world described in this book doesn’t seem very different from the real world of 1832, but I’m assuming the alternate history element becomes more significant later in the series.

Being a children’s book, the story is told from the perspectives of two children – Bonnie and Sylvia Green. Sylvia, an orphan, lives in London with her elderly Aunt Jane, but at the beginning of the novel she travels north by train to Willoughby Chase to stay with her cousin Bonnie. Bonnie’s parents, Sir Willoughby and Lady Green, are going abroad for health reasons and have engaged a governess, Miss Letitia Slighcarp, to take care of the children while they are away.

Left alone with Miss Slighcarp, the girls discover that their new governess is not what she claims to be and has another motive for coming to Willoughby Chase. Soon Bonnie and Sylvia are sent off to a horrible school for orphans run by the cruel Gertrude Brisket. Hungry and miserable, they begin to plan a daring escape, but will they succeed – and if so, where will they go? Will their friend, Simon the goose-boy, be able to help them? And what exactly is Miss Slighcarp planning to do now that she is in full control of Willoughby Chase?

Now that I’ve read this book I can see why it is considered a children’s classic and has been so popular with generations of younger readers over the years. It has an exciting plot, child protagonists to relate to, kindly adult characters to love and villainous ones to hate, and an atmospheric setting with snowy, icy landscapes and packs of wolves roaming the countryside. Speaking of the wolves, they play a big part in two memorable scenes near the beginning of the book, but are barely mentioned after that as the human ‘wolves’ come to the forefront of the story instead. The influence of Victorian literature on Aiken’s writing is also very obvious, from the Dickensian names of the characters – Letitia Slighcarp, Josiah Grimshaw, Mr Gripe, Mr Wilderness – to the portrayal of Mrs Brisket’s school, surely inspired by Lowood School in Jane Eyre.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and just wish I hadn’t come to it so late! I’m already looking forward to reading the second one in the series, Black Hearts in Battersea.