One secret of the charm of Frank Swinnerton's "Nocturne" is what may be called the warm disinterest, or sympathetic detachment, of the chronicler. He doesn't mean his little episode to "teach" anything: it is simply there before us, yet by no means as a "slice of life", for what makes it alive is the radiant energy of creative art. The artist's self as well as his skill informs it. Irony would be too cold a word for its mood, for there is something glowing here. As we enter that mood, we feel ourselves lifted to something like the wisdom and tenderness of the gods, glimpsing elements of beauty in the children of dust, and in the dust itself. "Shops and Houses" is a less sublimated kind of fiction. Its emotion is less intense and less from within. And it labors somewhat from the outset under the burden of an "idea". At once we are, so to speak, confronted with Beckwith, an English provincial town which is confessedly and unhappily typical. Beckwith is an ancient village but fifteen miles from London, half spoiled by the advent of railway and factories, yet still self-centered. It is a place of rigid class distinctions, raw social nerves, and ruthless tongues of censure or surmise…. It is a village of snobs, such as from Miss Mitford to E. F. Benson has made itself familiar to American readers as a kind of stronghold of Briticism. What gives Mr. Swinnerton's handling freshness is his explicit conviction that this narrow, ingrowing, pharisaical life of the Beckwiths of old England is a damnable thing, and not merely a quaint and amusing thing.

The opening situation is intensely British. The unchallenged social supremacy in Beckwith belongs to the Vechantors…. The Vechantors are a family of a good deal of charm, dwelling serene and contented on their high eminence, not haughty in bearing and of really gentle breeding, but half-consciously basking in their sense of superiority and precedence. Vechantor senior is a quiet paterfamilias, fond of his own company and a few old books. Louis, the oldest son, does what a gentleman may in a local bank. All is serene enough when falls a bolt from the blue in the person of a forgotten Vechantor cousin blundering into town in the place of a retiring grocer. Horrible! The village feels the outrage, and the incoming Vechantor and his luckless family feel it, and not least of all the reigning Vechantors on their eminence. The very presence of the interlopers, Vechantors behind a counter, is a vague menace to that eminence. The queen-mother herself, gentle and generous woman that she is by nature, shares the universal distress. And this Louis presently makes intolerable by actually showing a slight civility toward his cousins. The elder Vechantors ignore them; and there is presently a parental decree forbidding the grown-up Louis further intercourse with these people who have the insolence to be relatives without permission.

Louis is a bold Briton. He defies the decree; and in the end, with the approval of his converted elders, makes choice of his charming cousin, the grocer's daughter, as against the conventional Beckwithian female who has almost hooked him. But Beckwith is not to be lived in and remodeled by them or the new forces their union represents…. And Louis and his Dorothy, though they love the country and Beckwith itself, as the place nature made it, dare not try to live out their lives there. Nor is it Beckwith as an isolated spot they shrink from. (pp. 51-3)

So they choose London, where shops and houses are at least more indifferent, if not more kindly, to one another. Apart from this idea, and the two interesting lovers who struggle with it—and more vividly than either, perhaps—I expect to remember this book for its portrait of the "nice girl" Veronica, so "common" and unmoral beneath her surface conformity—an indubitable portrait of female Victorianism at its nadir. (p. 53)