Reproduced courtesy of Francis Frith.
'Another sinister hero of this wild region , at about the same period, was Faggus, the highwayman, who, though he has found no one to celebrate him in a novel, still lives dimly in the popular memory as a kind of cross between Dick Turpin and Robin Hood.'
Hope Moncrieff 1895
This quote is rather puzzleing given that Tom Faggus plays a leading role in the famous novel Lorna Doone by R. D. Blackmoor published in 1869.
ReplyDeleteVery bizarre! How involved in the character of Tom Faggus? I haven't read Lorna Doon, but I cant find mention of him in plot summaries online. Do you mean his stories where used under an alias? Perhaps Hope Moncrieff had not picked this up, for he was aware of the novel as this quote http://westcountryfolklore.blogspot.com/2010/06/doones-of-exmoor.html was directly before it in the text!
ReplyDelete*How involved in the novel was the character of Tom Faggus?
ReplyDeleteTom Faggus is very involved in the novel, Lorna Doone. He marries John Ridd's sister and helps defend the house when the Doones do a failed night raid to re-capture Lorna Doone. He also has to be rescued by John Ridd among the injured on the battlefield after being on the loosing side of the Monmouth Rebellion. I think Tom Faggus was taken out of his time zone to be in the Lorna Doone novel. Do you know when he lived? Roughly the years from and too? That is what I'm trying to find out.
ReplyDeleteRetro Brit
He's in a new novel,for children: Spirit and the Magic Horsebox. Out now with Forelock Books. And no-one knows exactly when he lived, but the book Lorna Doone placed him just after the English Civil War.
ReplyDelete