Elizabeth Sheppard seems to have been something of a child prodigy herself, writing her first play at the age of ten, learning half a dozen languages, and teaching music and Latin in her mother's school in her teens in the intervals between writing novels. This, her first, was started when she was sixteen and completed a couple of years later, and she took the trouble to persuade Benjamin Disraeli, novelist and future prime minister, to give her a blurb — "No greater book will ever be written on music", was his verdict, which suggests that Sheppard must have been better at PR than at prose writing, or that Disraeli thought he was off the record...

The novel is narrated by Charles Auchester, a boy growing up in the 1830s in a middle-class Anglican-Jewish family in the unnamed English city of Birmingham (made obvious by a string of geographical clues and many references to the Music Festival). His exceptional musical talents are discovered by a succession of inspirational teachers, who all seem to take him on without ever having heard him play or sing, he makes friends with a string of highly-talented young women, and is sent off to the musical equivalent of Hogwarts, the Cecilia School in Germany.

At the head of the chain of musicians is the quasi-angelic figure of the Chevalier Seraphael, a musician from a prominent German Jewish family, head of a music school in Leipzig an unnamed city in Saxony, promoter of the works of J S Bach, composer of songs without words lyrics, the Hebrides Mer de Glace Overture, a Shakespeare-ish masque, a biblical oratorio, etc. Anyone who hasn't worked out that this is meant to be the late Felix Mendelssohn, the biggest musical star of Victorian England, obviously hasn't lived in the 19th century.

Other characters are clearly inspired by real life musical stars too (Berlioz, Jenny Lind, Sterndale Bennett, etc., as pointed out in Professor Upton's helpful notes in the 1890 Chicago edition which is the basis for the Gutenberg text), although most of them are rather sanitised and anglicised and actually don't have all that much to do with their "originals". The Chevalier doesn't seem to have a sister, but the role of Fanny Mendelssohn is taken over by Maria, the brightest student in the Cecilia School, whose brain unfortunately explodes when she takes on the very unfeminine task of composing and conducting a symphony. The Jenny Lind character, Clara, suffers from the respectable English puritan prejudice against the stage, something that also cripples the career of their ballet dancer friend Laura. She doesn't have the option of leaving the operatic stage for the oratorio business, and ends up teaching Queen Victoria's ladies-in-waiting to dance quadrilles. Upton tells us that Charles is based on Joseph Joachim, but there's not much to back that up other than Mendelssohn's early patronage and the fact that Charles plays the violin. Sadly, we don't get to see him playing the solo in the Beethoven concerto aged thirteen.

This reads very much as you would expect a book written by a gushing teenager to read. She's full of passion, especially about music, her Jewish heritage, and the lovely Chevalier, and she's good at getting inside the head of young Charles, who is still singing alto for the first three-quarters of the book. A lot of that is charming and funny. But she also has a very teenage tendency to swim out of her depth, and gets lost in passages of confused symbolism and abstract discussions of aesthetics, so that at times it's almost impossible to work out what is going on, and you just have to guess that another female character has been killed off for no very good reason. Interesting for what it tells us about attitudes to music in mid-nineteenth-century Britain and Germany, and fun as an unintentional Harry Potter pastiche, but not a great novel. ( )

Written when she was only 16, the plot of this admirable little book centers on the hero in the title who is musically gifted. he attends a music school in Germany where he is under the tutelage of the master Seraphael, who is patterned after Mendelssohn. He also develops a romantic attachment to the beautiful singer, Jenny Lind. as a record of a spiritual experience of music, this novel may be unique. Vol. 1: http://archive.org/stream/charlesauchester00shep#page/n5/mode/2up
Vol. 2: http://archive.org/stream/charlesauchester02shep#page/n9/mode/2up