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Dean's Watch Hardcover – December 1, 1976

by Elizabeth Goudge (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 32 ratings
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Previous page
  1. Print length
    320 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Amereon Limited
  4. Publication date
    December 1, 1976
  5. Dimensions
    5.83 x 1.01 x 8.76 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0848805097
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0848805098
  8. See all details
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Amereon Limited (December 1, 1976)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0848805097
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0848805098
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.26 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.83 x 1.01 x 8.76 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 32 ratings

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Elizabeth Goudge

Elizabeth Goudge

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Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
32 global ratings
Contents:
5 Stars
Contents:
The setting for the story is a cathedral city in the fens. The city is populated with charmingly depicted characters that ooze quaintness from every pore. The main character is the old Dean, known in the town as a fierce and relentless man due to his hunting down of the city's corruption. And yet, the Dean is a misunderstood man. His love and fidelity are often met with indifference in the town, and this is even more true of his own wife who is deterred by his ugliness and who finds his devotion to her repulsive. Yet help is at hand, for the Dean owns a beautiful watch: a watch that becomes the starting point for a new friendship for the Dean, and new hope.
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Top reviews from the United States

Randlehouse
5.0 out of 5 stars A work of quiet resonance...
Reviewed in the United States on March 5, 2004
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Elizabeth Goudge is a fine writer. Her language is rich as butter. All of her stories are interesting, but this one is beautiful. I believe that, after all the books I have read in my rather long life, books of all manner of styles and genres, this book is the deepest and best. Her characterizations are strong and complex, her consideration of the human state both honest and compassionate. There is great affection for humanity, even in her most honest and grieving portrayal of it. Beautiful writing, strong story, interesting and provoking characters - I enjoy so much the honor of spending a few hours with this woman and the depth of her faith, courage and love.
26 people found this helpful
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S. E. Simmons
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully, beautifully written
Reviewed in the United States on September 19, 2015
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Goudge's work is, in a word, lyrical. Read any of her books for prose that is lovely, stirring and evocative. No excitement or adventure in the book, but I defy anyone not to cry at the end. Beautifully, beautifully written.
One person found this helpful
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poky
4.0 out of 5 stars Brand new book
Reviewed in the United States on September 3, 2010
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I thought I was getting an old book but this book is brand new. the binding and the cover is flawless and made to look like old books, just the way I like it but the pages give it away. The paper is thin and one can see through the next page in the back. Overall it was a good purchase albeit a little overpriced.
One person found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars One of my favorite stories by one of my favorite authors.
Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2018
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Amazingly beautiful story by one of my favorite authors. Had to add this to my collection and read again and again.
One person found this helpful
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The Teacher
5.0 out of 5 stars The Dean and his city
Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2013
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The Deans Watch got me involved with many characters (emotions and needs like our own), I would recommend it to others and have done that
One person found this helpful
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JARCohen
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on July 2, 2015
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This was a wonderfully written,
One person found this helpful
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sally tarbox
4.0 out of 5 stars "Those living in the shadow of the great cathedral"
Reviewed in the United States on May 1, 2018
Written in 1960, but set a hundred years before; this is a beautiful and uplifting book, in which relatively small incidents conspire to improve the individuals and the world about them.
The narrative opens with Isaac Peabody, an embittered elderly watchmaker who lives for his craft. Sharing a home with an unlovely sister, broken by a harsh childhood, he has turned his back on religion, despite living by the cathedral... And here is the Dean, one of his clients, an apparently stern man, with a cold-hearted wife... A good natured servant girl, a runaway apprentice, a cruel fishmonger, a delightful child...all come into the story, which is a gentle read with a Christian message.
4 people found this helpful
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John Gough
5.0 out of 5 stars Goudge in the class of Victor Hugo, or Dickens
Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2011
One of Goudge's last novels, The Dean's Watch, also exemplifies her view of life.
Set during the 1870s in an unnamed English fen city, whose heart is a medieval cathedral, it tells what happens when an old clock-maker, Isaac Peabody, mistakenly places a printed motto in the antique pocket watch of the grim cathedral Dean, Adam Ayscough, and subsequently meets the Dean.
Isaac is a tradesman and an atheist, brutalised by the hell-fire faith of his father who had been a Church of England priest in one of the city's churches. He is terrified of the cathedral itself, and would never dare presume to speak with such an elevated member of the gentry as the Dean.
Yet, a man of profound faith, and enormous compassion for the suffering poor, the Dean is himself emotionally crippled by shyness. He is as lonely, and as isolated in his marriage to his unloving wife, as Isaac is in the household he shares with his sister, who is embittered by self-sacrificing spinsterdom and her shame for the Peabodys' descent from the professional ranks of clergy-gentry to working class tradespeople.

Many other characters are pulled into the events of a few months; two teenage lovers, a near-decrepit elderly parish priest, a three-year old girl, a brutal fishmonger, and a woman in her eighties who lives amongst her fellow townsfolk as a kind of unrecognised saint.
Goudge also does not hesitate (neither does Victor Hugo) to throw in vigorous chapters of cathedral and town history, and many flashbacks and reminiscences of the earlier years of her characters. The book is packed with incident, character, and landscape, despite its immediate action being comparatively slight and covering a short span of present narrative time.

Of course, like all of Goudge's books, it is heart-warming. But it pulls no punches.
Goudge writes about the hard gritty stuff of real people, complex, flawed and contradictory in a real world of hope, pain, accident, evil and suffering, cherishing the flashes of goodness which can be achieved by human love. The earth closets (one-holers, lavatories) in the slum backyards stink. Young children are forced by brutal masters to climb inside and sweep chimneys. People hate, or love, as their mood leads them, and often do violent things. Senility descends on the extreme elderly. The stormy autumnal tone grows from the book's references to Shakespeare's sonnets and King Lear and A Winter's Tale, to John Donne's sermons and the organ music of Bach, to the callous violence of the Norman Conquests, Henry VIII's brutal dissolution of the monasteries, and Cromwell's puritan destruction of the rich fabric of the ancient church.

In such a dark world the creation of mechanically intricate and faithful watches and clocks, decorated lovingly with charming filigree or Dresden figurines or secret illuminated manuscripts, stands as a covert metaphor of the highest to which humans can aspire. At the same time the ticking of a watch and its sheer mechanical longevity stand as implicit reminders of the mortality of its maker, who labours to make the watch despite foreknowledge of his own death. (In our unthinking age of throw-away mass-produced digital watches Goudge's novel offers fundamental, old-fashioned values we do well to remember.)

Even the title means different significant things: the actual heirloom watch, which triggers the story; the Dean's "ticker" or heart, which physically beats uncertainly, yet passionately loves behind the shyness; the Deans' "watch", as a navy term, in which he faithfully steers the ship of the city and cares for her people.

All of Goudge's novels are "romances" in one important aspect: they hinge on moments of visionary insight for her characters, filled with that romantic longing for a strange beauty and joy which is known in German as "Sehnsucht". Dreams, glimpses of landscape, moments of weather, the sound of a voice or melody when no one else is present, sudden remembering of lost experience, or a poetry quote which stabs to the heart. These are frequently counterbalanced against moments of evil, terror, despair, emotional collapse, irrational rage or blinding hate. Most of her central characters are well educated and intellectually or emotionally gifted, although many are presented as frail, absent-minded, wounded. Yet not only are they bound up in everyday tasks, they are surrounded by salt-of-the-earth uneducated workers, heroic peasants comparable to the subjects of Hopkins' poems "Felix Randall", "Tom" and "Harry Ploughman", people of utter reliability and ancient Hardyesque virtue. Her characters' ages may vary from eighty to eight, or even younger. For Goudge there is little difference between adult and child except length of experience and acquired knowledge - their interests, emotions and needs are fundamentally the same. In some cases the children show greater maturity than the so called "adults", and even the animals, dogs particularly, owned by her characters show unspoken wisdom which may ironically exceed that of their masters and mistresses.

John Gough -- Deakin University -- jagough49@gmail.com
15 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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ROSE
5.0 out of 5 stars ravie d'avoir pu retrouver ce livre
Reviewed in France on September 14, 2016
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a force de lire et relire mon "the deans Watch, acheté aux U.S/A en 1985,il était en piteux état . je suis ravie de le retrouver neuf ! j'ai toujours apprécié E. GOUDGE la magie de son écriture et sa profonde compréhension de la nature
Le colis était en parfait état ainsi que le livre conforme à la description du vendeur.
Rose
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Rwth of Cornovii
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the great classics
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 25, 2014
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Reading Elizabeth Goudge with the standards of an earlier age is a pleasure that can't be underestimated. She doesn't duck misery, but deals head on with it and adds faith, hope and charity. The characters are mostly flawed, but each has good and bad points and work with their own and each other's failings to rise to greater things. Ill doing like Emma, the watchmaker's sister who throws exquisite carvings on the fire come to naught as the wrong people (for her) are able to build from the flaw. She is probably the only one unable to rise to greater things as she is devout, snobbish and thinks she is already perfect.
2 people found this helpful
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JeremyO
4.0 out of 5 stars The Dean's Watch
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 11, 2009
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I read this book many (many) years ago at school as part of my English Lit O level so I was pleased to find it and re read it. A great story, would make a good film or mini-series on TV.
2 people found this helpful
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Sash
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing Story
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 12, 2013
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This is one of my favourite books of all time. Beautifully written with many, many amazing character descripitons. A must for all Goudge fans.
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Mrs. Vivienne Tuffnell
5.0 out of 5 stars true feel-good fiction
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 18, 2016
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Just plain delightful, true feel-good fiction that errs on the right side of sentimentality. I'd recommend it as a read for the run-up to Christmas especially. A classic.
2 people found this helpful
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