Crispin Morrow

An elderly novelist of provincial inheritance, conscience and compromised reform, read by students, country wives and ministers for different reasons and quoted by all three as though he had written for them alone.

Crispin Morrow is one of the few writers in the small national canon that has begun to exist alongside Britannia’s local fames. His novels deal with inheritance, provincial conscience and reform that is achieved only by compromise, and they are read in drawing rooms, student lodgings and country rectories alike. Conservatives praise his families and liberals his conclusions; students, country wives and ministers each find something different in him, and quote him as though he had written for them alone. Much of his readership first met him in chapters printed weekly and carried by every lending room.

He is now very old and blind, and works by dictation. He is said to refuse, with great courtesy, every invitation to explain what his endings mean, on the ground that a reader who needs the author to settle the question has not yet finished the book.

Companies meet Morrow more often through his readers than in person, since his phrases are quoted in county halls and ministries by people who believe he agreed with them. Those who do call on him find a patient listener who likes to hear how the provinces are really managed, and who may ask a company more about its last county than it expected to tell.

In person

Crispin Morrow is eighty, lean and frail, with thin white hair, a white beard and moustache, and a gaunt, deeply lined face. He is blind, his eyes white and sightless. He dresses in an old-fashioned dark coat, waistcoat and cravat, and sits at a writing desk surrounded by manuscripts and books he can no longer read, listening with an attention that makes visitors choose their words carefully.