Inda Palmer

Mary Lawson's Secret

With The Old Curiosity Shop and David Copperfield, both released in 1911, and Nicholas Nickleby in 1912, Thanhouser established itself as producer of the best Dickens adaptations in American film.

An innocent man is accused of murdering his aunt.

During World War I, a countess and her young son volunteer to don disguises and take an important secret message through enemy lines.The fluid editing and vastly more dramatic cinematography (especially the use of close shots for expressiveness and intimacy) are part of the extremely rapid advances in the artistry and technique of the film medium compared to just a year earlier.

In the home of the stalwart young son and his mother, the girl rescued from the sea grows strong again after her fearful exposure. Her attractiveness, so different from that of the fisher maidens, has a telling effect on the young man. He asks her, at length, to become his bride, and she accepts. But a few days before the wedding the affianced bride disappears, sailing away with a strange man from the city, who has suddenly appeared. Thinking that his sweetheart had deserted him for another, the fisherman is heartbroken for a time, but gradually the keen edge of his sorrow wears away, and he succumbs to the attractions of another girl, one who had recently come to the village with her father, and who had lived together and alone at the end of the town.

Henry Dennys, a wealthy Englishman, has two sons who are frequently brought into the company of Edith Danvers, whose father, a retired general, lives on the adjoining property. As the youths approach manhood each one unknown to the other is secretly in love with the girl.

The Fisherwoman was a dominant force on the busy island. Unaided she had built up a large business. She employed many fishermen, and grew wealthier year by year. She sent her son to college, and was delighted when he told her, after graduation, that he intended to help her in the work. Contact with the world, however, had spoiled him for a narrow life. The mother divined his secret, although he tried to hide it. "You have your own life to live, my son," she said, "and I would not keep you here." The son's progress in business was rapid. One day word came from him that he was married, and he sent his mother the picture of his bride. Time passed, and the son wrote more and more infrequently. The mother believed that the wife was to blame, and although they had never met, she began to hate her bitterly.

The Colonel, for many years, has lived in the past, reverencing the lost cause of the Confederacy and hating all Northerners. When his daughter, Rose, named for her mother, falls in love with a New England youth, he haughtily refuses his consent. Rose and John Hewins run away and are married.