In ["The Georgian House"] the author has assembled a number of well-tried and generally reliable ingredients: an old-fashioned house with a secret panel; a hero who is at the beginning of the book living under an assumed name and is evidently under some sort of romantic cloud, from which he is called home to take his inheritance; a wise old lady who understands the young things; a missing will; a thorough-paced villainess; a black-mailing lawyer's clerk; and other stand-bys too numerous to mention. The sort of book that results from such a combination is in most cases excellent entertainment, and of that we cannot have too much. If "The Georgian House" kept its promise of good traditional melodrama it would be a pleasure to read and recommend it. But unfortunately the good old melodrama never quite comes off.

There appear to be several reasons for its failure. The various parts are not sufficiently connected. And there are many minor characters, treated at considerable length, who have no effect upon the plot at all. In another sort of book, this would matter less; but in a book in which the plot is so insisted on as it is here, where every few pages there is an intimation that we shall see more of this or that there is more in that than meets the eye; it is difficult to realize that there are whole scenes that are meant to stand only by their own interest.

Mr. Swinnerton appears to have tried to write a melodramatic novel in which the chief interest should not be in the story, nor in the principal figures, but in the setting, the lesser actors, and other elements. This of course can be done; Dickens did it, though not by design, in almost every book he wrote; and it is no doubt tempting to a writer of Mr. Swinnerton's technical skill. But though it can be done, it cannot be done by hurrying over the crises of the melodrama at the rate that "The Georgian House" does…. [Each of the three turning points of the action] is given a treatment which is so sketchy as to be positively shamefaced…. it would seem that Mr. Swinnerton had attempted a melodramatic novel which should avoid the melodrama's vices, and had unfortunately succeeded in avoiding the melodrama's virtues as well.