My Uncle Silas is a book of short stories about a bucolic elderly Bedfordshire man, written by H. E. Bates and illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. Bates's Uncle Silas figure, and many of the lineaments of his character, were based on a real person named Joseph Betts, the husband of H. E. Bates's maternal grandmother's sister Mary Ann. Betts lived in a village in the Ouse Valley, was born in the early 1840s, and lived to the early 1930s. The figure he portrays is Rabelaisian and robust, a true countryman of pithy and roguish character, simultaneously earthy and whimsical, crabbed and wicked, yet full of humour and "strong original devilishness." Bates considered that, if anything, he had understated the true English rural character.
Adaptations (1)
My Uncle Silas was adapted into a television series.
My Uncle Silas? · television series · 140 min · IMDb ↗IMDb7.3In 1901, a middle-class schoolboy whose parents are working abroad spends his summer in Bedfordshire with his great-uncle Silas. Though sixty years old, Silas relishes life—he’s a womaniser, drinker, and a poacher. At the prompting of his long-suffering housekeeper, Mrs Betts, he takes on the occasional odd job.
