Did not finish. Yet another book about how smart men manage to overcome obstacles and go on to do the best for their fellow underclass. The hero fighting a union because he knows best and would treat his workers fairly was the end for me. ( )

Quick Summary: Beginning in 1839 at the beginning of the Victorian era, the story involves an ambitious man, John Stevenson, and the shrewd, equally ambitious Nora Telling. Together they take over a working mill and the building of a railway tunnel in Northern England. With their friends Walter and Arabella Thornton, they create their own dynasty.

While a well-written novel, there were moments where I became bogged down. The descriptions of the building of the Summit Tunnel between Manchester and Leeds were tedious at best, and I feel only to be appreciated with those with an engineering background. I did appreciate MacDonald's attention to details, I merely did not care so much to observe the laying of every brick. Call me a Philistine.

MacDonald brings to the page the ugliness of poverty, the sweat and grime of hard work, the ruthlessness of ambition. John Stevenson, while an observant, good-hearted man, will not allow his emotions to override good sense. Upon meeting a starving family, he offers the father work, but no charity. John's reasoning is that employment is the way out of starvation and the many privations that go along with poverty.

Nora is much of the same mind. Upon witnessing the plight of a beggar child, she states that if charity were done away with altogether, the evil of children begging would be done away with entirely. When John argues that children would die then, Nora pragmatically declares that they'd die anyway. It's not heartlessness on Nora's part. Nora is a realist, coming from a world rife with poverty, incest, and the death of her own small siblings. For her there was no tender upbringing. She was not sheltered from the ugliness of life.

Which calls to question why she is friends with Arabella Thornton, a prim, proper lady from a middle-class background. Pious to the point of absurdity at times, she is the very example of how virtue can be ones downfall. Though kind, she is prideful, arrogant, and class conscious. Her initial meeting with John is witness to this, when she tries several times to put him in his place as a man of lower caste. Instead, he puts her firmly in her place, with the idea that the world is not so cut and dry as she once believed. This makes her uncomfortable with John for some time, but eventually she comes to admire him greatly for his nobility and strength, those often associated with the upper classes.

This brings us to Walter Thornton, her husband, of the upper classes but with absolutely no backbone. John and Nora mock his many weaknesses. His main weakness, however, seems to be a sexual addiction, and Walter has a hard time coming to terms with Arabella's frigidity. Marital relations with Arabella he finds greatly disappointing, and he both respects her and despises her for her coldness. Upon seeing her in her Christmas dress of pale blue,calm and cool, he thinks in admiring terms of how like an iceberg she looks. This could go in many different ways, but it seems that sex is never far from Walter's mind. He creates scenarios in his mind to make up for the lack of excitement. In one instance, Walter pretends that he's having sex with a corpse while making love to Arabella. We witness Walter's degeneration until the close of the novel, where Walter is left in a pathetic state, weeping and syphilitic. Through Walter we see what vice can bring to the weak-willed.

Bawdy at times, heartbreaking at others, this novel is rich and broad and would please both the romance reader and those interested in good historical fiction. ( )

Fiction, England