Vivian's Reviews > The Shepherd of the Hills

I found a 1907 edition of this book and snapped it up, knowing it to be my mother's FAVORITE book of all time. I had given her a paperback reprint but she insisted that it had been edited and was not as good. I began reading them simultaneously and found her accusation to be true. First, the country dialects have been removed, possibly because they cast those who use them as less educated and refined and also because many of today's reader's don't wish to be slowed down with stumbling through pronunciations. I soon set the edited paperback aside and read only from the original volume.

Editing dialect out of books changes the spirit of a book. How is the reader to fully appreciate how new-comer "Dad" Howitt was held in esteem by his back-woods neighbors? How is the reader to detect the transformation of Sammy under his tutelage? How is the reader to know why Sammy works so hard to become worthy of her childhood betrothed who has come into fortune, education, and position where she is destined to join him outside the hills of their youth? Will the reader come to love the hill folks "just as they are" with all that means, as the Shepherd does?

Part Cinderella, part Beauty, part Phantom, this story echoes the human drama as Dickens and Hugo wrote. Like Thomas Hardy, Bell writes of that fragile transition from agrarian subsistence to frenzied industrialism. He presents to readers his thoughts on what real manhood and real womanhood is. Whether or not today's reader agrees is less predictable than it was to those who first read and loved his work.

I admit I used about 20 hankies through the last ten chapters. How much that had to do with my suffering from a cold, I'll never know.