Hugh Walpole, now almost forgotten, was a literary giant. Descended from the younger brother of the 18th-century prime minister Robert Walpole, he was a prodigiously fast writer who seldom revised his work, producing at least a book a year between 1909 and his death in 1941. But who reads him these days? His books sold in vast numbers, including in America, where on his lecture tours in the 1920s he was more lionised than Dickens had been 80 years earlier. With his accumulated wealth he became a discerning art collector and left a fabulous legacy of paintings to the Tate and the Fitzwilliam.
In 1924 he made a home in his beloved Keswick, where between 1927 and 1932 he wrote the only one of his works which remains in print: this brilliant chronicle of the Herries family — the name Herries taken from Redgauntlet, the historical novel of Walpole’s literary god, Sir Walter Scott. Beginning in the early 18th century with Rogue Herries, the chronicle drives on through Judith Paris, The Fortress and Vanessa up to Wapole’s present day in the early 1930s. And what a saga it is!
The 3,000 pages of the four volumes seethe with drama, intense passions both thwarted and slaked, hatreds, feuds and disasters, as the lives of the descendants of Francis Herries, the original Rogue who sold his mistress at Keswick fair, play out against an unfailingly authentic historical background.
In recording every word of this gigantic saga, Peter Joyce took on a huge challenge, although for a man who has recently recorded Hamlet, playing every part himself, perhaps it seemed less daunting. Over two years Joyce spent 300 hours in the studio to record these 100 hours of the Chronicles’ four volumes, in addition to time taken to prepare the 3,000 pages for reading aloud.
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