PRECAUTION

James Fenimore Cooper  (1789-1851)

Sir Edward Moseley and his wife and four children have just moved into their new house/mansion located in Northamptonshire, England.  John, Clara, Jane and Emily are the children, well, young adults, of marriageable age.  Their neighbors are the Jarvises (merchants and business persons), the Haughtons (an upper class family of good repute), and the residents of The Deanery:  the rector Dr. Ives, his wife and Francis, the son, and two daughters.  The story opens with the above characters dining with the recent arrivals at Moseley Hall.  Uncle Benfield with his valet Peter Johnson share in the festivities.  Also Colonel Egerton and his friend Captain Jarvis.  George Denbigh appears as a stranger to two of the Moseley girls as they visit the Ives at the Deanery several days later.  George becomes a welcome associate of the family and a potential suitor for the hand of Emily.

Captain Jarvis loves to shoot at things:  pigeons, foxes, wrens, even his hat once.  His friend is Colonel Egerton, a somewhat dubious character who appears as a sort of hanger-on of the Jarvis family.  Egerton aspires to the hand of Emily Moseley, but ends up marrying one of the Jarvis girls.  Jane and Francis Ives are the first couple to be united as the plot unfolds;  Francis, a religious like his father, is granted  the living of a nearby diocese.  The Chattertons consist of a dowager mother with several daughters and a son.  There are other characters as well who dance in and out of the plot, creating confusion in the lives of the other personalities as well as in the mind of the reader.

The Captain and Egerton are out hunting one day.  They return to the rear garden of Moseley Hall, where Emily, her sisters and George Denbigh are lolling about.  Fooling about with a shotgun, Jarvis points it at Emily and pulls the trigger.  George dashes in front of her just in time to intercept the bullet and is wounded but saves her life.  They fall in love, but later suffer a separation because while on a vacation at the beach, Emily befriends a Mrs. Fitzgerald who has a dire story to tell about the predatory behavior of George.  She claimed that while she was escaping from an abusive husband in Spain, he tried to take advantage of her and was only saved at the last minute by a passing English soldier.  Because George's pocketbook was found in Mrs. Fitzgerald's house, the assumption was made by all that George had returned to visit her with ulterior motives.  So Emily dismissed him disdainfully.

The Earl Pendennyss was supposedly the richest bachelor noble in England and was a cousin of George's.  Of a philanthropic nature, he allocated funds right and left, trying to get rid of the money that kept rolling in as a result of his investments and properties.  His interest in Emily increases in spite of her generally comprehensive dislike and avoidance of all men.  Colonel Egerton asks Jane, Emily's sister to marry him, but one of his former companions, Captain Henry Stapleton, wrecks his plans by spreading rumors around about Egerton's true character, which is that of an opportunist and addicted gambler.  Jane turns him down, so he marries one of the Jarvis girls instead after he finds out that her father was making a lot of money as a merchant prince.

Catharine Chatterton is urged to marry Lord Herriefield because he's rich.  They move to Lisbon and she writes that she's very unhappy so John and Jane, Grace Chatterton and her mother sail to Portugal to straighten things out.  Herriefield is angry because his wife only loves his money.  Later she leaves him and returns to England.  The four embark on another ship to sail back home.  Jane meets the Reverend Harland aboard ship and later he asks her to marry him.  Meanwhile Lord Derwent, Pendennyss's cousin,  is interested in Emily but she's not interested in him.

So things go until Bonaparte returns from Elba and rampages through Europe.  By this time George Denbigh (spoilers ahead) has confessed that he is also Earl Pendennyss and has married Emily.  Things are beginning to get straightened out with assorted marriages and separations when Denbigh/Pendennyss leaves for Waterloo with his regiment.  Egerton is there also and after the battle starts, spends his time dashing around trying to avoid trouble.  But it finds him anyway and he's fatally wounded.  Pendennyss, having fought bravely through the whole affair, finds him and hears his confession about how he set Denbigh up by stealing his pocketbook to incriminate him for actions that in fact he, Egerton, had done.  Pendennyss returns triumphantly to England and they all live happily.

As may be evident in the above paragraphs, this is a complicated book with lots of characters;  more, even, that those i've mentioned.  I'm not even sure at this point whether i've mangled the continuity or not.  I think i got it all straight but i'm not sanguine about it.  Anyway, the point of the book seemed to be, that parents should think ahead before committing their children to possibly unsuitable relationships.  Money and social position are not guaranteed passages to happiness that they might appear to be.  But although Cooper had this message in mind, it wasn't evident to me that his book was really supporting that idea.  It seemed rather, that most of the accidents and travails experienced by the young people were a result of causality:  the consequences of pre-ordained states of mind and social position more than anything else.

Like all of Cooper's works that i've read, the writing is under a master's hand, even if it gets a bit windy at times.  But because, or owing to, the fact that this was his first book, his gifts were somewhat like wild horses, with lots of potential but maybe a lack of control;  too many reins and not enough fingers, perhaps...  In general i liked the novel.  It was sort of a cross between Austen and Trollope with more physical action than either of those two more famous authors might have allowed to permeate their pages.