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3 AT WORK AND AT PLAY: CHARLES LEE’S
CYNTHIA IN THE WEST^1
Gemma Goodman
Th ey have no time to sit and look at Nature. Th eir life is one long fi ght with her. I am
ashamed sometimes. Th is painting as a life-work – it is playing at living. Th ey live.^2So says Mr Forrester in Charles Lee’s novel Cynthia in the West. Published in
1900, the novel is set in the fi ctional Cornish fi shing village of Tregurda. ‘Th ey’
are the local inhabitants whose lives and livelihood is entirely dependent on the
sea. Being both a local man and a painter, Forrester occupies a unique position
in the novel – his perspective on the workers is sympathetic and, as can be seen
above, makes him question painting as an occupation. Yet within the novel he
socializes with a colony of painters who have descended on Tregurda from Lon-
don. Th ey view the local inhabitants with scorn, distrust and as an ‘alien race’ and
it is the complex relationship between the two groups which Lee’s novel explores.^3
Charles Lee was a popular novelist in his own lifetime but he and his work
have largely dropped out of cultural consciousness. He has received a small
amount of recognition in the last twenty years with the republication in 2003
of his antholog y of bad verse Th e Stuff ed Owl.^4 Given that Cornwall is the pri-
mary focus of his literary output there remains some awareness about his work in
this area and in 1995 the Cornish publisher Tabb House published Th e Cornish
Journal of Charles Lee – extracts from his fi ve notebooks which cover the period
1892–1908.^5 It is here that we see Lee’s acute observation of local life – cus-
toms, folklore and the Cornish dialect – and with a specifi c purpose. As K. C.
Phillipps notes in his introduction to Lee’s journal, entries which include ‘work
up’ or ‘might make something of this’ show Lee’s intention to use the recorded
material in his novels.^6 Alan M. Kent believes him to be ‘one of the most success-
ful re-creators of Cornish life in fi ctional form’ with an accurate understanding
and ability to delineate in his novels Cornish dialect, humour and Cornish
experience during the period 1890–1940.^7 To date, however, there has been no
academic exploration of his Cornish novels: Th e Widow Woman (1897), Pa ul