Talk:Erb

Information about this edition
Edition:	London: Methuen & Co., 1903
Source:	Internet Archive & and Project Gutenberg
Contributor(s):	WSer
Level of progress:
Notes:	There are differences in the US (PG) and UK (WS) editions, mostly minor. These were adjusted while proofreading
Proofreaders:	Les Bowler (pgdp.net) and older'n'w'ser (WS)

Reviews

Bookman (UK) October 1913:

Mr. Pett Ridge has been told so often, and probably knows so well, that his novels are deficient in plot and lacking in construction, that he must, by this, find the information as unamusing as it has always been uninstructive. It should be sufficiently obvious that any finished plot and ingenuity of construction would take from his novels those very qualities of truth and naturalness that his critics so unanimously admire in his work. For which of us telling the unexaggerated story of his life would find it developing into a cohesive whole, with a definite plot running through it, or through any part of it? The lives of most of us, of the poor especially, are nothing but a tangle of casual, disconnected incidents and episodes, fragmentary adventurings this way and that, broken romances, or romances that languish and lengthen to unromantic conclusions—there is no orderly procession of events to an effective end; and Mr. Pett Ridge has set himself to reproduce life as it is really lived, and he knows very well that it is not, especially in such lives as he pictures, a chain of sequential happenings linked up into any sort of completeness. His is one form of art, and the construction of a story threaded on a strong and definite plot is another; the one is not nearer perfection than the other, it is simply different; and to judge the two by the same standard is mere foolishness.

Erb is an ambitious young railway carman with a talent for oratorv and organisation. He is greatly given to open-air speaking in Southwark Park, and, exercising a powerful influence over his fellow employees, plays the leading part in a strike, and, being discharged, founds a Carmen's Union and is elected Secretary. The proceedings of the Union, the rivalries and intrigues that crop up against Erb, and the ingratitude of his friends that finally disillusions him, are related realistically and with an abounding humour; and Erb's romance, his love of the practical, pretty, slightly lame little teacher of elocution brightens through the rougher elements of his career with an idyllic charm. Rather vulgar, very conceited, but leavened with a simple honesty and good-heartedness, Erb is shown faultily human, in his habit as he lived, and his shrewd, sharp, consumptive sister Louisa is no less faithfully and sympathetically portrayed. The aristocrats of the story may not be quite so convincing, but its common men and women are always individualised with a wonderful vigour and clearness, and informed with just those characteristic traits and mannerisms that of right belong to them.

We do not place this with Mr. Pett Ridge's best books (not with "A Breaker of Laws," for instance), but it is nevertheless an exceedingly clever transcript from life; it has a strong human interest, is coloured with humour and pathos, and marked throughout by those thousand and one trivial but illuminating touches of observation and insight, and intimacy with humanity, that are the peculiar properties of Mr. Pett Ridge's genius.

Outlook 22 November 1913:

A decidedly humorous English story. "Erb" is a cockney labor agitator, a good fellow, a little inflated with his rhetorical fluency, but sensible, hard-headed, and honest. The author follows Dickens's literary methods in some particulars, but without slavish imitation. He gives us the chaff and bounce of the London workingman most amusingly, and the story has some good lessons in it, not obtrusively put.