Doctor Wortle's School

The novel takes place in the respectable, fictional parish of Bowick, Victorian England, with the main plot concerning itself with the renowned Dr. Wortle's Christian seminary academy. The community's morals are outraged and the school's credibility wounded upon the discovery that Mr. and Mrs. Peacocke, a respectable English scholar and an American woman, hired to the academy by Wortle, are indeed improperly married.

Their wedlock was rendered asunder by their chance meeting, some years prior, of Mrs. Peacocke's first husband, an abusive drunkard named Colonel Ferdinand Lefroy.

Hearing that an ambiguous Colonel Lefroy was killed during the Civil War, the two believed it was Ferdinand, because Ferdinand's brother told them so and they married.