Country Landlords

The young lovers Gertrude Fitzhammons and Anarawd Gwynne are caught between their fathers’ mutual antagonism. Eventually, Gertrudes’ adoptive father, the retired sea captain Ricardo Lewis, is forced to flee Britain due to the machinations of old squire Gwynne and Lewis’s mortal enemy, Lord Morlif. At the same time, Anarawd is sent abroad in the hope that he forgets his sweetheart. After several years apart, their separate fates lead them to meet again in Naples during the spring revolutions of 1848. After Lewis’s betrayal to his death on the republican barricades, a broken-hearted Gertrude returns to her Welsh home. Will Anarawd follow her or seek his fortune abroad in the British Army?

Loosely inspired by social and agricultural advancements in the district around the author’s home in Porthmadog, Country Landlords (1860) looks at the relationship between the landed gentry and ordinary country population in the early nineteenth-century.