Her Benny

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You can spot the doomed character early on, the right people repent, and because it's non-conformist it's (slightly) more believable than eg Susan Warner. Their mother is dead, their father a drink-sodden brute, who dies later on in the story, becomes violent towards Nelly and the two children run away from home. Then raising his voice to a loud pitch the shouted, “Mike, come down here: there’s a chap that ‘as five pun’ in his pocket; let’s collar him quick!

Gilt decorated blue cloth with a black and white illustrated frontis and black and white illustrations throughout. When Oscar Wilde said you’d have to have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing one wonders whether he was really thinking of Hocking.

They flee an abusive father and take to the streets of Liverpool to provide the meager necessities of life. A varied cast ranges from night watchman Joe, whose Calvinistic leanings at first prevent him, almost literally, from seeing the light, to well-intentioned gentry and kindly farmers. In the meantime Nelly gets God in a big way and starts to wish for the sweet release of death because people have told her that heaven is a reward and better than life on earth. A story that is heart wrenching in parts and full of emotion throughout, I defy you not to tear up when reading this. Like them, its principal message is that diligence and honesty will be rewarded; Benny as Industrious Apprentice has his Idle counterpart too, in the character of Perks, a street boy who repeatedly but unsuccessfully attempts to lure Benny into crime, and ends up dying in Dartmoor prison.

Didactic in intent, yet sympathetic in tone, his 'rags to riches' tale was well calculated to appeal to a contemporary audience. My mum has been trying to her me to read this for years but it never appealed to me, embarking on the 59 book challenge with one of the topics "a book your mum loves" I had to choose this one. In the winter those streets and courts are kept comparatively clean by the heavy rains; but in the summer the air fairly reeks with the stench of decayed fish, rotting vegetables and every other conceivable kind of filth.The harshness of life and death is brought easily to the minds eye of even a modern reader, and the book is certain to bring more than one tear to the eye of even the most cold hearted of readers. The book sold over a million copies, and it is easy to see why such a tale would have appealed to the late Victorians, following on from the social issues first raised by Dickens. If my story] shall awaken any sympathy for the poor little waifs of our streets, I shall have my reward. They are the apple of each others eye and cling together for survival like a couple of limpets on the Albert Dock wall. Despite the obvious drawbacks - melodramatic story line, a surfeit of religious instruction, the suffering of the (admittedly likeable) hero turned up to the nth degree, tear-jerking scenes always only a page away - this Victorian novel may present to the sophisticated reader of the 21st century, I found it to be sincere and affecting.