My main question is who dug the passage beneath the statue? This was a great podcast as usual. I think your various theories are present in a subliminal way, I don’t think the author was thinking of all of the class issues, just writing an adventure in a way that he is familiar with. I want to read this story at some point if I can wade through descriptions of his collected stories to find a book it is located in.
Hodgsons bibliograpby on Wikipedia lists this story as his first published work in Royal Magazine in 1904. He most definitely had a word count and his newness is most likely the reason for the not great structure.
Haha, yeah, that's about how I feel, too.
Hmmm, ok. I'm still not sure that makes much sense (whether it's a real thing or not), but I'll accept that there is at least an attempt at an explanation in the story.
The story mentions that the tunnels are left 0ver from the English Civil War. I have no idea if that's a real thing or not, but it seemed silly (in a delightful way).
Yeah, the passage beneath the statue and the mechanisms of the pedestal were a major plot hole for me. The park was built with the money left to the town by Whigman, so presumably was built - and the statues installed - after he died. That means the lone Thug cultist must have dug the passage on his own without anyone noticing (even if he was underground, there would have been noise). But the crumpled paper that dropped from Whigman's diary implies that the mechanisms of the pedestal were already in place before it was installed in the park. Presumably Whigman himself didn't design the pedestal, so we have to assume it was part of the statue when he found it. Which leaves the frankly baffling question of why the statue had such a pedestal in the first place.
Unless I missed something (which is completely possible), this is a confusing mess of a plot device that exists solely to allow the story to happen and hadn't really been thought through by the author.
Incidentally @Daniel Falch: the story is included in the collection "The House on the Borderland and Other Mysterious Places". That's where I read it anyway.