It is the time of Queen Victoria and a young married man working as a clerk in New York discovers that he has inherited a business out west including our eponymous hero. With a naive belief in their newly acquired life of gentrification and leisure the young couple head out to claim the inheritance but find that they are required to work long and hard in their new backwoods home. The charm of this tale is in the well drawn Dickensian cast of characters though it does suffer from an excess of sentimentality at times. The tale is, for me, ultimately saved by the inventiveness and frontier spirit of the main protagonists as they strive to drag their business and community out of the backwoods and into the "modern" Victorian age.