ReadHowYouWant.com Hermsprong Man As He Is Not: [EasyRead Large Edition] Paperback – Large Print

Robert Bage's "Hermsprong" is one of the funniest, smartest, most engaging novels of the British eighteenth century. It is one of the few literary works for which the phrase "unjustly neglected" is strictly accurate. Bage's sixth and last novel, "Hermsprong" is a romantic comedy - a he & she story ending in marriage and wealth - but it's much broader and rowdier than, say, something by Jane Austen (Austen's heroines rarely draw pistols on the men oppressing them). It also has a marked satiric aim, mostly to pillory a corrupt English aristocracy along with the servile church that defended its power and privileges.Charles Hermsprong is the son of an English father and a French mother, born in Philadelphia, and raised among Indians in the western Great Lakes region. When the story begins, he has just returned to England as a young man. Hermsprong is an odd blend of Enlightenment philosophe and American "savage," with abundant physical energy, a generous heart, the gift of gab, and a slashing sense of humor. He is also an outspoken radical on virtually any political, social, and religious topic - an anti-monarchial, anti-ecclesiastical, egalitarian progressive in the manner of Tom Paine or Voltaire. Bage has created in his dashing hero the ideological anti-type to Edmund Burke, the prophet of romantic conservatism, whom Bage took swipes at through six successive novels.Early in the story, Hermsprong meets and falls in love with Caroline Campinet, whose father, unfortunately for them both, is the decadent, licentious, arrogant Lord Grondale, a great comic monster. Hermsprong and Lord Grondale despise each other from their first meeting, and Caroline is caught in the classic romance conflict between obedience to her father and desire for marriage with the man she loves. In his account of the struggles between Hermsprong and Lord Grondale, Bage stages debates on a wide range of contemporary topics in the kind of sparkling, intellectual dialogue we associate with George Bernard Shaw, the modern writer Bage most nearly resembles. Needless to say, the good end happily and the bad end unhappily, which is why, as Oscar Wilde reminds us, they call it fiction. The ending, though gratifying to the romantic in all of us, is virtually conjured with a magician's wand.Bage is not, to be frank, as great a novelist as Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, or Austen. He only started writing in middle age after having spent his first fifty years or so as a businessman in the Midlands, and he remains, finally, a gifted amateur. But he is highly intelligent, broad-minded, temperamentally skeptical, and thoroughly good-natured, and he can be laughing-out-loud funny. "Hermsprong," with its radical ideology, fell out of favor in the reactionary period of the early 1800s and has only lately been reissued by Broadview Press. It would be great if it now found its way to a new, larger audience. It's great fun to read, intellectually provocative, and offers encouragement in the continuing struggle for humane, liberal values against the reactionary defenders of the status quo.