Midwinter: Certain Travellers in Old England

Midwinter: Certain travellers in old England is a 1923 historical novel by the Scottish author John Buchan. It is set during the Jacobite rising of 1745, when an army of Scottish highlanders seeking to place Charles Stuart onto the English throne advanced into England as far South as Derby. The Prince, otherwise known as "Bonnie Prince Charlie", the grandson of the ousted King James II, required men and money from English Jacobite sympathisers, and the novel imagines why those were not forthcoming from landowners in the Western counties and Wales. It purports to sheds light on Samuel Johnson's previously unknown activities during that period.



Buchan was living in Oxfordshire when he wrote the novel, and the countryside around his home provided part of the novel's setting. His house, Elsfield Manor, had associations with the real-life Dr Johnson. One literary stimulus had come from Vernon Watley, a neighbour at Cornbury Park, who in 1921 sent him a copy of his own privately-published book Cornbury and the Forest of Wychwood, in which he recounted stories of Lord Cornbury harbouring Jacobite fugitives after Prince Charles's retreat from Derby. Buchan dedicated his book to Watley.



In The Interpreter's House (1975), David Daniell reported that the book was widely admired, by J. B. Priestley among others. Daniell called it "highly successful, being the Huntingtower of Buchan's historical novels", and he praised "the spinnings of the wheel of Chance ... and the cunning plots and counter-plots". (wikipedia.org)