Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island

WELLS, H.G. [347] pp. Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc 1928 7 3/4" x 5 1/2" Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island is a 1928 novel by H. G. Wells. The novel entered the public domain in the United States in 2024. The protagonist of the novel, Arnold Blettsworthy, is the scion of a genteel family prominent "in the south and west of England." Blettsworthy's father, however, was an adventurer who married a woman from Madeira. Both his mother and his father die early, and the young Blettsworthy is raised in Cheltenham by an aunt and an uncle who is a liberal Anglican priest. A complacent Edwardian worldview that an Oxford education did nothing to shake is undermined when Blettsworthy is betrayed in business and in love by his best friend, Graves, and his mistress, Olive Slaughter. A family solicitor and counselor named Ferndyke advises him to travel in order to recover from disillusionment so severe that it has threatened his sanity. Arnold Blettsworthy follows his advice and embarks for Pernambuco and Rio de Janeiro on a tramp steamer, the Golden Lion. But the captain and crew take a disliking to him, and when the vessel founders off the coast of Brazil there is a mutiny that results in the captain shutting Blettsworthy in a cabin and leaving him to perish with the ship.…