All Creatures Great and Small: The Novel in Focus

THE GREAT YORKSHIRE SHOW Since 1838 the Great Yorkshire Show has been the annual grand event showcasing Yorkshire's best livestock. Originally hosted by a range of towns around the area, its home is now Harrowgate, where the festival takes place for three days every July. Along with contests for the animals, the event high-lights farming and rural life in Yorkshire. Herriot gives the following description: "In avenue after avenue, the latest machines and equipment are displayed. Sheep are sheared, horses shod and goats milked in demonstrations of farm work. In the main show ring, the heavy horses parade, glittering and jangling in their finery, packs of hounds are shown, and one of the biggest draws is the show-jumping competition" (Herriot, The Best of James Herriot, P. 470). The Show is Yorkshire's largest annual event.

by James Herriot

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The Novel in Focus

The plot. The story begins with an anecdote describing a difficult calf-birthing and the snide suggestions of a disagreeable farmer. The anecdote is a typical incident from All Creatures Great and Small, a memoir that recaps the early years in the life of country veterinarian James Herriot.

After the first chapter, the novel unfolds chronologically following Herriot's graduation from Glasgow University as an M.R.C.V.S (Member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons) and his subsequent search for a job in a saturated market. Faced with the prospect of working for no pay or taking a job in an unrelated field, Herriot responds to the advertisement for a veterinarian's assistant in Darrowby, a small town in the Yorkshire Dales. There he meets Siegfried Farnon, a brilliant and devoted veterinarian who has a special talent for forgetting things.

Quickly befriending his charming but absent-minded employer, Herriot is immediately faced with solving the maladies typical of English farm animals. Using fields and barns as his operating rooms, he meets the farmers who help form the foundation of British society. It is from the lives of these characters that the stories are mainly spun, as the young vet travels among the farms in a car without brakes-because his boss repeatedly forgets to fix them. He meets People and animals of all shapes and sizes throughout his travels. One of the people is his employer's carefree brother, Tristan, a romantic and directionless young man who proves to be a grand drinking partner and matchmaker for Herriot. One of the animals is Tricki Woo, a spoiled Pekingese dog whose taste for sweets leaves him looking like "a bloated sausage with a leg at each corner" (All Creatures Great and Small, p. 205).

Life's adventures unfold both at the office and throughout the countryside. Efforts at bringing order to the business lead to the hiring of Miss Harbottle, a secretary specializing in organization. Her testy relationship with the forgetful Siegfried soon proves comical as she strives for order and he for freedom.

The element of humor is highlighted by Siegfried's scheme to provide fresh food. He proposes the purchase of chickens and swine to cultivate in the backyard. The plan is soon foiled by the escape of the livestock, which run amok through the marketplace despite the efforts of his outnumbered and overmatched brother.

In the field treating the countryside's sick animals, Herriot encounters both tragedy and miracles. He treats pigs named Queenie and dogs named Mr. Heinz and makes the necessary visits to keep healthy the cows and horses that form the backbone of the thriving agricultural economy in Britain. It is on these rounds that James meets a young woman named Helen. After a series of dates that prove remarkably inauspicious, the two find themselves falling in love. The story of the fledgling country vet culminates with his marriage to Helen in the Dales and their subsequent honeymoon. He and his new wife prove their devotion to their country and their work by spending the days after their marriage on a farm giving tuberculin tests. Herriot's newly established life seems complete.

Over time, Herriot comes to regard Yorkshire as his home and refers back to what might have been with no regrets. He describes the "high clean-blown land where the scent of grass or trees is never far away" with an obvious love, and leaves readers with no doubt that he truly believes his life has made him a "privileged person" (All Creatures Great and Small, p. 247).

Accents. Out of the pages of All Creatures Great and Small comes a mix of dialects. Placed directly between England and Scotland, Yorkshire possesses a wide range of accents throughout its many valleys and mountains. The language is not simply muddled by the mixture of the two countries; it is inherently different because of its peculiar mix of Norse and Celtic roots. The area therefore features a great number of English variations for which translations are often required.

The countryside inspires unique dialects because of the isolation of the farms. Otherwise unheard accents were sometimes retained by farmers whose most frequent contact with the world at large could be the country vet. The voices of the region are as varied as the characters who speak them in a land that has been farmed for over a thousand years. "Just a young pig, isn't she?" Herriot asks an observing farmer in the pages of his novel. The farmer affirms this with "Aye, nobbut a gilt," the term gilt standing for a female pig who is grown but has not yet given birth (All Creatures Great and Small, p. 131).

A specialized vocabulary was developed by the farmers of the area, from which a few examples follow: Hills are generally referred to as "dales" by people in reference to the highlands. The valleys below are known as "vales." Barns are called "field-houses" or "cow-houses" in Swaledale, but residents of Wharfedale and Craven prefer "laithes." As shown in All Creatures Great and Small, nearly everything in Yorkshire possesses a variety of names, depending on who is describing it. Even towns possess multiple names. The author's home town is called Tresche, Tresch, Treusig, Thrysk, and Uisge, aside from simply Thirsk. Each area has further-more developed a personalized form of speech so that some of the various towns, and even some farms, may have their own distinctive accent and some unique phrases to describe common occurrences of the area. In Yorkshire, for example, people speak of a light-milking cow as "operating on three-cylinders."

Sources. The author of All Creatures Great and Small, whose real name was James Alfred Wight, was a country veterinarian by profession, but he had a penchant for storytelling and a hidden desire to write. After twenty-eight years of hearing stories about daily veterinary adventures, Joan Danbury Wight told her husband that fifty-year-old vets never became authors. Taking it as a challenge, he bought some paper and retold the events of his younger life. The author took on the pen name James Herriot out of respect for the anonymity of the country veterinarian's profession. Soon afterward, All Creatures Great and Small became an instant classic.

It is an autobiographical work, focused in Yorkshire's invented little town of Darrowby, which is, according to Herriot, "a bit of Thirsk, something of Richmond, Leyburn and Middleham and a fair chunk of my own imagination" (Herriot, James Herriot's Yorkshire, p. 22). The book follows the author's own story, from his Glasgow University graduation with an M.R.C.V.S. membership to his marriage a few years later. The character Siegfried Farnon was based on the author's real-life elder partner. Any characters mentioned, animal or human, were based upon memories of the author's early career.

The name of the book was derived from a hymn by Mrs. Cecil Alexander, which ran: "All Things Bright and Beautiful, All Creatures Great and Small, All Things Wise and Wonderful, The Lord God Made Them All." Herriot also named three other books written about his younger days after the hymn.