The Critical found the book in general both insipid and improbable. While assuming it was right to portray Etheldred as contemptible, it insisted that Guiderius should not have been the only respectable Englishman.
qtd. in
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press, 2000, 2 vols.
1: 538
Literary Setting
Anna Maria Mackenzie
The title-page quotes lines from Thomas Otway
about a massacre of children by soldiers; chapter one quotes Milton
on the torments of a bad conscience. The story is set in the tenth and eleventh centuries...
Textual Features
Henrietta Rouviere Mosse
The first volume packs in many historical or semi-historical events. Earl Godwin
murders Ethelred
's son Alfred Ætheling
at Guildford Castle; Henry I
's only legitimate son and heir dies by drowning in 1120...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Ann Hawkshaw
The sonnets begin with the arrival of human beings on the lands that became Great Britain and wend their way through history, moving through treatments of the English kings including Alfred the Great
and Ethelred the Unready