The Blackmore Country — Context and Discussion

Voice and the Shifting Register of Evidence

Snell's narrative voice moves between three distinct registers: the topographical guide, the literary critic, and the local historian. In the preface, he adopts a measured, scholarly tone when discussing John Blackmore's finances, citing the fact that he “took pupils, in addition to serving his poor cure” as evidence of straitened circumstances. Yet when he turns to the Doone legend, his prose becomes more speculative and conversational. He describes the tradition as one that Blackmore “inherited,” and dismisses the notion that it was “his invention” with a tone of mild exasperation. This shift in register—from cautious documentation to confident assertion—reveals Snell's deeper investment in the authenticity of the folkloric material.

The Structure of Dispute: Weighing Competing Theories

Snell structures the discussion of the Doones as a series of competing hypotheses, each introduced with a named authority. He presents Mr. Cooper's claim that the Doones appeared “after the Revolution,” then counters it with Blackmore's earlier dating. He introduces Mr. Edwin J. Rawle's theory that “Doone” derives from “Dane,” and then offers his own philological speculation: the local pronunciation of “Dunn” as a common West Country surname. The paragraph builds like a legal argument, with Snell positioning himself as a moderator. He even includes a reference to Miss Ida Browne's Short History of the Original Doones, which he has already summarized in his earlier Book of Exmoor. This layered citation creates a sense of an ongoing scholarly conversation, with Snell as both participant and chronicler.

Pace and the Accumulation of Detail

The pace of the prose varies markedly between sections. In the preface, Snell moves quickly through revisions and acknowledgments, compressing multiple sources into a single paragraph. But when he reaches the Doone controversy, the pace slows dramatically. He devotes several paragraphs to a single question—whether Blackmore had access to a manuscript compiled by Charles Doone of Braemar in 1804. The sentence “This consists of a manuscript entitled ‘The Lineage and History of our Family, from 1561 to the Present Day’” introduces a cascade of specific evidence: the journal of Rupert Doone (1748), oral information, and family heirlooms. This accumulation of detail mimics the method of a detective assembling clues, and the reader is drawn into the slow, meticulous process of evaluation.

Snell's editorial voice is that of a guide who is also a skeptic. He does not simply describe Devon's landscapes; he interrogates the stories attached to them. Readers will benefit from paying attention to his footnotes and asides, where the most telling shifts in tone occur. The book rewards those who read it as a layered argument about how fiction and place mutually shape each other, rather than as a straightforward travelogue.

Snell’s Devon, all misted moors and old Doone grudges, lingers with me like a half-remembered lane. And yet, when I set him down, my thoughts drift to another wanderer entirely — one who walked Ceylon’s hotter, stranger paths, seeking not legends but their quiet human echo. Both books share that patient, unhurried gaze, turning landscape into a whisper. From Adam's Peak to Elephanta — Text and Context holds that same tender archaeology of place, I find.