Abstract

McTaggart′s father and mother were both members of a prosperous Wiltshire family, the Ellises: in fact they were first cousins, and this inbreeding may account for his premature death from a circulatory disease to which several Ellises succumbed. The Ellises were of yeoman stock, and had enriched themselves by West Indian enterprises; they had risen in the social scale via the practice of law. It is rather reminiscent of the The Forsyte Saga, a saga, as Galsworthy said, of the Sense of Property.