A series of essays inspired by books that I own, talking about their history, some reviews and also how they came to be on my shelves. With over 6,500 books here and several more arriving each week I doubt I'll ever be short of a topic.
Of the four books that I am reading to mark the ninetieth birthday of Penguin Books this was probably the one I was looking forward to most. Eric Linklater was an established novelist by 1935 when Penguin began, with six of his twenty three novels published by then and a seventh coming out that year. Poet’s Pub was his second work (1929) and would be adapted into a film in 1949 although that version bears little relation to the original novel. I was already familiar with Linklater’s work from probably his best known novel ‘Private Angelo’ a comic satire of war based in late WWII Italy and published in 1946, which I first read and enjoyed a decade or so ago and probably should get off the shelves and re-read at some point. However I wasn’t disappointed with this also comedic book which at times, such as the extended car chase from the fictional village of Downish, north west of London, to Scotland and the aftermath of the Elizabethan dinner which provides the opportunities for the two thefts that push the plot forward, descends into near farce.
Saturday Keith, named as such by his father as he was the seventh son and they had all been born on different days of the week is the eponymous poet and the Pelican Inn in Downish owned by the mother of Quentin, an old friend of his from university days, is the public house. Or more accurately the inn/hotel as the regular guests staying there along with the staff provide Linklater with his much varied cast of characters and few patrons of the public bar are even mentioned. It’s a setting that has attracted many authors over the decades from E M Forster’s ‘A Room with a View’ to Anita Brookner’s ‘Hotel du Lac’ and even Stephen King’s ‘The Shining’ along with numerous crime classics, where else could you believably have such a diverse group of people in one place with no need to explain who they are and why they are there?
Keith took the job as landlord with the hope that along with a regular income, something definitely lacking for the vast majority of poets, he would have a quiet space to work on his magnum opus, the poem that would finally mark his breakthrough onto the public consciousness. The work running a surprisingly successful inn once it become known it is run by a literary gentleman, and thereby attracts a more upmarket clientele, means he struggles to find time to work on his epic and the assorted distractions both from Quentin and Joan Benbow, the daughter of one of the guests whom Keith has fallen madly in love with add to the comic possibilities. Quentin has likewise fallen in love only he is smitten by Nelly Bly who is working there as a maid but in reality is a part time journalist for a national newspaper that is hoping to get some interesting stories. Amongst other guests there is an American by the name of Mr van Buren who has invented a new method for processing crude oil and if I say that his paper describing the technique is in an identical folder to that used by Keith for his poem I’m sure you can see where confusion lies later on in the book. Throw in some industrial espionage, a missing secret recipe for a blue cocktail available in light and dark shades to represent Oxford and Cambridge along with a few other quirks of the people staying there and the story positively bowls along dragged down only by the overlong car chase but even that has its redeeming and indeed ridiculous features.
Poet’s Pub is still in print by Penguin, although it now comes under Penguin Classics which I think is only fitting for this excellent novel that has stood the test of time remarkably well.
Book number two from Penguin Books’ first ten titles which I’m reading in the quite fragile first edition copies to mark their ninetieth anniversary is A Farewell to Arms. As mentioned in last week’s blog about Ariel all the original rear covers for these books refer to this book as Farewell to Arms but this was quickly noticed and corrected and after the initial distributed batch the ‘A’ was reinstated. I’ve never been a particular fan of Hemingway, but I have enjoyed this, his second novel, which is based quite heavily on his own experiences in Italy during WWI although with fictional military units and characters some of which are based on real people. It was first published in 1929 and was sandwiched between his first novel ‘The Sun Also Rises’ and a non fiction book ‘Death in the Afternoon’ both of which are concerned with bullfighting which was a passion of his and probably negatively coloured my original impression of Hemingway.
The book follows American volunteer Frederic Henry who is serving as a Lieutenant in an ambulance corps for the Italian army before the Americans actually joined WWI. He meets an English nurse named Catherine Barkley but is rebuffed when he tries to kiss her. Later Henry gets badly injured in one knee during a mortar attack on the front line, getting decorated for his bravery in assisting fellow soldiers and ends up being looked after for months in a hospital in Milan where he is treated by Catherine and a relationship develops. I don’t know why but I wasn’t expecting a romantic story from Hemingway and this it definitely is as the deepening love between Frank and Catherine during his recovery supersedes the war driven plot in the first section of the book. Only for the war to come back into the story as Frank recovers sufficiently to be posted back to the front just in time for the Italian army to retreat in the face of German onslaught. Later whilst hiding as a civilian he joins up again with the now pregnant Catherine and they make an escape to Switzerland.
Hemingway on the other hand arrived in Italy in June 1918, aged just eighteen, as a Second Lieutenant working as an ambulance driver. In July he was injured in a mortar attack and got decorated and promoted to Lieutenant for his bravery in assisting fellow soldiers and then ended up spending six months recuperating in a hospital in Milan where he met an American nurse named Agnes Von Kurowsky and fell in love with her. Rather than go to Switzerland to escape the war in reality the conflict finished whilst he was being treated and he went back to America in early 1919 expecting Agnes to join him later. Instead she got engaged to an Italian officer and the two never met again.
That Hemingway had first hand experiences of the scenarios depicted in the novel is obvious in the vivid descriptions both of the conflict and the life in Milan during Frank’s recuperation, which at times seems so far away from the realities at the end of the First World War. The book is written in the first person from the point of view of Frank and I was particularly drawn in by the later sections covering the retreat from the north where Frank and his crew were as likely to be shot by jumpy and trigger happy Italians as the advancing Germans. The text is accurate enough for me to follow their movements on a map of northern Italy and then his escape from actually being shot by a group of disaffected Italian lower ranks and Carabinieri because he is an officer leading to his abandonment of his uniform to avoid reprisals through to the ultimate night time row across the Swiss border.
Below is a photo of my first edition copies of the first ten Penguin titles issued together on 30th July 1935.
30th July 1935 was a very important date in the history of publishing, as that is when the first ten Penguin books made their appearance. Ninety years later these books in their first editions are somewhat fragile and definitely difficult to find, especially the crime titles. I do have all ten and seven of them still have their elusive dust wrappers as can be seen below, the wrappers have the 6d (six pence) price on the front cover. For August I’m going to be reading the first four, one a week, and the plan is to read five of the remaining six during the rest of the year, one has already been a subject of a blog so this will be linked to when its turn comes, I will probably re-read this one as well just to say I’ve read the set in a run. As the books are so delicate, and valuable, this is not something I have done before but it only seems appropriate as a means to celebrate Penguin’s 90th birthday. The books are colour coded with blue indicating biography, orange fiction and green crime, other colours would be introduced as time goes on. This was a concept started by Albatross Press in Germany, see my blog on those books for more details and the similarities between them and Penguin.
Before talking about ‘Ariel’ the book there is one other thing that needs to be mentioned regarding these first ten books and that is an error on the back of the very first versions of all of them. Book two, ‘A Farewell to Arms’, is missing its first word in the list of titles on the rear. This was noticed quite quickly but not in time to prevent the first batch of titles going out with this incorrect list. Subsequent batches of books from the first editions of all ten books were corrected and the full title appears, however another error happened with ‘Ariel’and this is clear on the front cover at the top of this log entry. The authors first name is André not Andre and this led to a third cover being produced for the remainder of the first edition run of this title, not a great start to a new publishing enterprise. The first edition is therefore available in three variants:
Farewell to Arms on the rear and Andre on the front
A Farewell to Arms on the rear and Andre on the front
A Farewell to Arms on the rear and André on the front
All three versions are shown below, the first book being the rear of the one used at the top of the page with the missing accent, the second book is also missing the accent on the front cover.
Another thing to add, as it is clearer at the base of the rear covers above, is that Penguin Books when it began was simply a paperback imprint of the publisher John Lane The Bodley Head which explains why all the books say THE BODLEY HEAD on their front covers. This would be the case for over a year with Penguin Books finally becoming a separate entity and references to The Bodley Head no longer appearing from the batch of books numbered 81 to 90 published in March 1937.
When reading ‘Ariel’ it becomes clear that its subtitle ‘A Shelley Romance’ is particularly appropriate, as whilst it reads as a biography of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley it is at least partially a novel with a lot of clearly invented dialogue with no documentary evidence behind it, rather than what we would regard as a properly researched scholarly work today. That said the general thrust of the book and the sequence of events is accurate and it is impossible to examine the extent of Maurois’ actual research due to the lack of notes, citations or even an index in the book. Maurois is clearly more interested in getting a feel for his subject and portraying him in a way that gives an impression of what it would have been like to know him rather than providing a definitive biography, but it is very readable and still in print, both in this translation by Ella D’Arcy and other more modern versions.
We follow Shelley from his time being badly bullied at Eton, going on to Oxford where he lasted just a few months before being expelled from the university along with his friend and fellow student Thomas Jefferson Hogg over the authorship of a pamphlet entitled ‘The Necessity of Atheism’ which he had mailed to the bishops in the area and the heads of all the Colleges. Whilst at Oxford he had met Harriet Westbrook, a sixteen year old school friend of his sisters whom shortly after his nineteenth birthday he eloped to Edinburgh with. This led to their considerable financial difficulties as both sets of parents were outraged and stopped their allowances. Shelley had two children with Harriet, the second born after he had run away to France with the sixteen year old daughter of William Godwin and her sister whilst believing Harriet had begun an affair. Mary of course became famous as the author of Frankenstein which was published and went on to write several other novels after Shelley’s death but Maurois completely ignores this side of her portraying her as a dedicated wife, they married just days after after Harriet’s suicide, but also covering domestic arguments mainly between her and whichever other people (usually other women) were living with them at the time. The lack of acknowledgement of Mary’s literary talents is possibly the greatest failure of this biography. During the coverage of Shelley’s extended time in Italy, until his death there at just twenty nine, the quality of the biography improves markedly with letters included and far more evidence provided for what Maurois states happened.
Sadly Shelley never enjoyed the fruits of his poetic labours, as at his death he was still barely read and his life too coloured by his socialist and atheist reputation to make him acceptable reading for anyone likely to see his works in print, which is ironic bearing in mind his status as one of the great Romantic Poets nowadays. By all means read this book by Maurois as a general overview of the life of Shelley, but if you are really interested in the poet I have to recommend ‘Shelley: The Pursuit’ by Richard Holmes, first published in 1974 but still the definitive work.
The book is set sometime in the 22nd century, we know this as the year 2095 is mentioned as occurring in the past. Earth has been involved in a terrible war which has led to massive depopulation to between one and two million people over the entire globe, and due to radiation poisoning a significant reduction in fertility of the survivors. The planet is now administered by the Vugs, a race of telepathic beings from Saturn’s largest moon Titan who ended the conflict and whilst not seen as occupiers of Earth they are always around. Amongst the survivors are the maybe a couple of hundred thousand Bindmen, owners of huge swathes of cities and states and their non-B residents. The Bindmen play The Game putting title deeds to their properties and even their wives as stakes in the game which is encouraged by the Vugs who both love gambling and recognise that constant swapping of partners enhances the chances of a fertile couple meeting. The story starts with Pete Garden loosing not only his favourite property, the city of Berkeley in California, but also his wife Freya and to top it off has failed to throw a three which would allow him to take another wife. To make things more on edge Pete is already a drug addict and known suicide risk having attempted to take his own life on four previous occasions.
When Pete recovers from his latest low after losing the game he visits the winner and asks to buy back Berkeley only to find it has already been traded to an American East coast player called Jerome Luckman, a man who having won most of that side of the country was looking for a way in to play on the west coast and Berkeley was to be his opening stake. Pete meanwhile moves to another of his properties where he meets a telepathic non-B female resident who has been surprisingly lucky and has three offspring and he hopes to seduce her or possibly her prettier eighteen year old daughter. That evening though Pete throws a three and is immediately married to another partner just before Luckman arrives to play the game with Pretty Blue Fox as the game group in California is known and wins so consolidating his position.
But then there is a murder and The Game is going to completely change with everything you know, or think you know drastically altered…
Voyager Classics was a relatively short lived series of science fiction and fantasy books from Harper Collins all with the same blue and silver cover design, with French flaps and a different small, but sort of appropriate, image in the box on the front along with the spine. In this case the ace of spades even though the game they play in the book, Bluff, is clearly a board game. At the time of writing Harper Collins still list two titles in this series on their website, however only one of these has this rather attractive cover design. The Game-Players of Titan is book ten of the thirty six listed titles at the start of the book and they must have all been released, or at least announced, simultaneously in 2001 as this is the first edition. The initial set includes the three Lord of the Rings novels along with The Silmarillion making Tolkien the most represented author, but Ray Bradbury, Stephen Donaldson, David Eddings and Kim Stanley Robinson each appear three times. Philip K Dick has one other titles in the first thirty six, ‘Counter-Clock World’.
As you can see from the title image the cover is rather glossy and difficult to photograph so I did a search on Google to see if I could find another image of the Voyager Classics edition. I did, but the title is subtly different, missing the ‘The’ and also the hyphen in Game-Players. I have no idea if this is a later erroneous edition or what but it is an interesting oddity.
Another of the small number of books I still own from my membership of the Children’s Book Club in the early 1970’s, this one has a rather unusual subject for a book for children as Sophia Scrooby is a child slave in Connecticut around the time of the American War of Independence. Captured in Africa at the age of about six years old after her entire tribe were wiped out in a Zulu raid, she was transported to New England and sold for three pounds (around £500 today) to be trained as a lady’s maid and companion to Prudence, the young daughter of the Scrooby family. Pansy, as Sophia is normally called lives a somewhat unusual life as a slave being treated by the family more as the companion than a servant and is taught embroidery to work on a sampler and whilst working on the letters comprising the border she learns the alphabet and thence by looking through Squire Scrooby’s library secretly slowly teaches herself to read. This ability she reveals after she has been there a year, Squire Scrooby is blind and on his birthday she picks up a book and starts to read to him astonishing the entire family, especially Prudence who hasn’t managed to learn to read yet, Pansy is then tutored along with Prudence in the skills of a young lady, playing music, singing, painting etc. a far different life to that normal for a slave.
This pleasant existence is cut short however by the failing of the Squire’s fortune during the war and his house and goods are seized along with Pansy, who as a slave is simply another chattel to be sold to offset the debts. From this point of the book the narrative speeds up dramatically with Pansy sold to another slaver and pirate intending to take her to New Orleans but she escapes along with two other child slaves and the English captain of a ship captured during a pirate raid. He takes them all to England where Pansy uses her musical talents entertaining his aunt and her friends and then on the London stage. Frankly reading it now for the first time in probably fifty years it’s all rather far fetched but I remember fondly first reading the book (probably at the age of nine) which is why it stayed in my library when a lot of the other books from my Children’s Book Club collection are long gone. I’m glad I came across it again and reread it, it’s not as good as ‘Mortimer Also‘ or ‘The Ghost of Thomas Kempe‘ which are also survivors from that series on my shelves but it was a pleasant read with a satisfying, if rather predictable, ending after 225 pages.
Martha Bacon Ballinger died of cancer in 1981 at the age of sixty four. At the time she was associate professor of English at Rhode Island College and had published several books including two volumes of poetry. Sophia Scrooby Preserved was originally published in 1968 and was her first book for children. After the initial hardback editions by Little, Brown and Company and Atlantic Monthly Press in America and Victor Gollancz in the UK, this Children’s Book Club version was probably published around 1971/2 (it isn’t dated) and finally there was a 1973 paperback by Puffin Books which doesn’t appear to have been reprinted. I can find no further examples and it has remained out of print for over fifty years. All the editions, regardless of publisher, were illustrated by David Omar White.
If anyone had asked me before last week if I had read Frankenstein I would have replied “yes” as I was certain that I had done so although many years ago. Yet when I started reading a few days ago it became clear that I had never read this thoroughly enjoyable book before as it was completely unfamiliar. I have of course seen several of the largely terrible films and memories of those must have blurred my recollections but the book is so very different to the various ‘adaptations’ and is well written especially bearing in mind this was the twenty year old Shelley’s first work of fiction. I was particularly keen to read the book this week as next month I will be reading the first four Penguin books to mark ninety years of Penguin and the first of those is Ariel by André Maurois, which is his biography of Mary’s husband the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
I think a lot of people know the story of how Frankenstein came to be written, but if you don’t then Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin as she was then, was away in Geneva in 1816 with her soon to be husband, whom she had run away with at the age of sixteen despite the fact that he was already married, she was eighteen by now. Also in the group was Lord Byron and his private doctor John William Polidori and there came an evening with poor weather so they were ‘trapped’ inside and it was suggested that each person present should write a horror story. Byron started a tale but didn’t get very far, it was later published as ‘a fragment’, Shelley wrote what would ultimately be five short ghost stories, Polidori didn’t get anywhere with his own story, but would later pick up Byron’s fragment and write ‘The Vampyre’, the first ‘modern’ vampire story, published almost eighty years before Bram Stoker’s classic, Mary of course started Frankenstein. Two years later in 1818 it was finished and published, by which time Mary and Percy were married, at the end of 1816 just days after the suicide of his wife.
It was immediately apparent to me that I hadn’t read the book before from the unfamiliar opening, which consists of four letters from Robert Walton to his sister Margaret as he embarks on an Arctic voyage from Archangel in northern Russia to attempt to reach the North Pole. Not where I expected the book to begin. In the fourth letter however there was a hint of what I had anticipated.
a strange sight suddenly attracted our attention and diverted our solicitude from our own situation. We perceived a low carriage, fixed on a sledge and drawn by dogs, pass on towards the north, at the distance of half a mile; a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature, sat in the sledge and guided the dogs. We watched the rapid progress of the traveller with our telescopes until he was lost among the distant inequalities of the ice.
Undoubtedly it’s the monster, but what is he doing on a dog sledge in the high Arctic? The next morning another sledge is spotted, this time in a bad way with just one dog still living and trapped on a shrinking ice floe. Its badly frostbitten occupant is encouraged to board the ship and collapses soon afterwards, however as he slowly recovers he starts to tell his story to Walton, who each evening writes down what the stranger has told him, eventually revealing his name as Victor Frankenstein and how he came to create the creature they had spotted earlier.
It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.
How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.
The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.
This is where I struggled somewhat with the plot as Frankenstein simply runs away into the night rather than confronting and possibly destroying his creation which would have been the most logical outcome, although shortening the book somewhat. Instead when he returns to his lodging he discovers the monster is gone and he doesn’t see or hear of it again for the next two years. For a year of that time the creature improbably lives undetected in a small room attached to a cottage occupied by probably the least curious family imaginable for it never occurs to them to go round the back of the house and look at the outbuilding and its eight foot tall inhabitant. We are further asked to believe that just by observing this family he learns from scratch to not only understand their spoken language but also to read with no tuition. However if we discard my objections to this plot device then when the tale is picked up again the creature has found the Frankenstein home in Geneva having walked from Ingolstadt (roughly halfway between Munich and Nuremburg) a distance of some 400 miles (650km) although again it is not clear how he has managed this feat. To say that the crossing of paths between the creator and his creation after all this time does not go well is an understatement but it is from here that the book becomes more enjoyable again leading up to the fateful denouement on the Arctic Sea.
If you haven’t read Frankenstein then you should, there is a lot more going on both in the plotting and social commentary, which is only appropriate from the daughter of radical thinker and novelist William Godwin. My copy is from the new Penguin Vintage Collector’s Classics series, which included this book in its first ten titles published in March 2025. They are a lovely series of books with foil embossed covers and marbled end papers along with matching sprayed edges. The first ten titles were split evenly between ‘Gothic’ and ‘Romantic’ novels and a great selection they are too.
The first book to be featured on my blog of the ninety volumes published as Penguin Archive to mark the ninetieth birthday of Penguin Books on 30th July 2025 and oddly I have chosen this one because of the translator rather than the author. The book was translated into English from the original Czech by Edith Pargeter, better known by her pen name Ellis Peters and the author of the medieval mystery books featuring the monk from Shrewsbury Abbey called Brother Cadfael. Pargeter was born and brought up within a few miles of where I live now and died just a couple of miles away so I’m always intrigued when I come across anything different she worked on and until reading this book I didn’t know that Pargeter became fluent in Czech following her time in the country in 1947. The original Czech title is ‘Ostře sledované vlaky’ and in some English translations is given as ‘Closely Observed Trains’. The 1966 film that was based on the novella also seems to switch titles between the two options depending on where it was released. The film won the 1968 Oscar for best foreign film and was nominated for the 1969 BAFTAs in the best film and best soundtrack categories. The line on the cover ‘A Penguin since 1982’ refers to the first year one of Hrabal’s works was published by Penguin Books.
Hrabal worked as a railway labourer and train dispatcher during WWII, whilst waiting to complete his law degree in Prague as the university was shut down during the German occupation. The knowledge he gained from this experience is fully used in this 1965 novella which is set at a somewhat eccentrically run small railway station during 1945 as the Nazi troops were being forced back across Czechoslovakia. The main protagonist of the book is twenty two year old apprentice dispatcher Miloš Hrma, who at the beginning is about to start his first shift back at the station after attempting suicide by slitting his wrists three months previously. The eccentricity of the station can best be emphasised by the description of the Station Masters office:
The station master is as unconventional as his office, keeping his pigeons, which he exchanged from a German to a Polish breed at the start of hostilities, in the roof of the station and when upset shouting profanities into the ventilation ducts in his office. Miloš may be the apprentice dispatcher and his suicide attempt after failing to perform in his first foray into lovemaking with his girlfriend does mark him out but his senior dispatcher is also a man to be reckoned with. During Miloš’s time recovering Výpravcí Hubicka had had a bet with the telegraph operator and when she lost had used all the station’s ink rubber stamps to decorate her naked behind. Something that she simply finds as funny but has greatly upset not only the station master but the railway inspector who unexpectedly arrives to perform a disciplinary. As you can imagine the operation of the station is somewhat chaotic and that’s without the interaction with the occupying German troops.
The fighting on the Eastern Front and the subsequent traffic with trains containing fresh troops going east and injured and dead troops going west along with ammunition and equipment heading into the conflict seems to provide most of the movements through the station. These are presented as stark contrasts to the craziness at the station which flips between the wildly funny and the tragic, especially in the brilliant and unexpected denouement. I greatly enjoyed this book and will now try to search out the film.
In 1949 The Folio Society decided to have a go at resurrecting the works of Robert Smith Surtees who had sadly dropped out of fashion since his heyday in the Victorian period with an edition of his first book, indeed his books used to be so well known that Virginia Woolf referred to this very title in the 1925 novel ‘Mrs Dalloway’ as her eponymous character was searching for a book suitable to take to a nursing home.
This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing. Think, for example, of the woman she admired most, Lady Bexborough, opening the bazaar.
There were Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities; there were Soapy Sponge and Mrs. Asquith’s Memoirs and Big Game Shooting in Nigeria, all spread open. Ever so many books there were; but none that seemed exactly right to take to Evelyn Whitbread in her nursing home.
Frankly if I was in a nursing home then Surtees may well be just the right author for my convalescence as the books are well written, with excellent observations on country life and Jorrocks is one of the great comic characters of the early Victorian age. This book was printed in only the third year of The Folio Society’s existence and was intended as a one off from this author in companion with a similarly designed edition of The Compleat Angler by Izaac Walton. However it was so popular that they subsequently published the remaining seven books by Surtees at the rate of one a year, making Surtees the first author to have their complete works published by the society.
John Jorrocks is described as a grocer in the book but as he operates out of his own warehouse rather than a shop he is probably a fairly wealthy wholesaler based in London. He is a keen fox hunter, riding with the Surrey hounds based at the small country town of Croydon about ten miles from central London. Anyone who knows Croydon nowadays, it has a population of around two hundred thousand and has been largely subsumed by Greater London, will find the rural descriptions of the place in the 1830’s difficult to imagine but this really was the case back then. Jorrocks’ regular companion is Mr Stubbs who is normally simply referred to as The Yorkshireman and one of the funniest passages in this book describes a ride from the middle of London by both of these gentlemen to join the hunt on a particularly foggy day in the city with the chaos they cause or get involved in. As Surtees is not well known nowadays I’m going to include a couple of examples of his style. The Yorkshireman never seems to have any money but is quite happy to live off Jorrocks as in this plan for a weekend trip.
“Now to business—Mrs. J—— is away at Tooting, as you perhaps knows, and I’m all alone in Great Coram Street, with the key of the cellar, larder, and all that sort of thing, and I’ve a werry great mind to be off on a jaunt—what say you?” “Not the slightest objection,” replied the Yorkshireman, “on the old principle of you finding cash, and me finding company.” “Why, now I’ll tell you, werry honestly, that I should greatly prefer your paying your own shot; but, however, if you’ve a mind to do as I do, I’ll let you stand in the half of a five-pound note and whatever silver I have in my pocket,” pulling out a great handful as he spoke, and counting up thirty-two and sixpence. “Very good,” replied the Yorkshireman when he had finished, “I’m your man;—and not to be behindhand in point of liberality, I’ve got threepence that I received in change at the cigar divan just now, which I will add to the common stock, so that we shall have six pounds twelve and ninepence between us.” “Between us!” exclaimed Mr. Jorrocks, “now that’s so like a Yorkshireman. I declare you Northerns seem to think all the world are asleep except yourselves;
Jorrocks also loves his food and drink and there are long descriptions of meals and consuming numerous bottles of wine and port in one sitting. I particularly enjoyed the contrast between the eating manners of the English and French when Jorrocks takes The Yorkshireman with him on a trip to Paris and the slow appearance of course after course in France confuses him rather than the everything on the table to start with which was then the preference in England and he assumes he is going to starve due to the lack of visible food. Early on in the book he invites The Yorkshireman round for breakfast before heading out to the hunt.
About a yard and a half from the fire was placed the breakfast table; in the centre stood a magnificent uncut ham, with a great quartern loaf on one side and a huge Bologna sausage on the other; besides these there were nine eggs, two pyramids of muffins, a great deal of toast, a dozen ship-biscuits, and half a pork-pie, while a dozen kidneys were spluttering on a spit before the fire, and Betsy held a gridiron covered with mutton-chops on the top; altogether there was as much as would have served ten people. “Now, sit down,” said Jorrocks, “and let us be doing, for I am as hungry as a hunter. Hope you are peckish too; what shall I give you? tea or coffee?—but take both—coffee first and tea after a bit. If I can’t give you them good, don’t know who can. You must pay your devours, as we say in France, to the ‘am, for it is an especial fine one, and do take a few eggs with it; there, I’ve not given you above a pound of ‘am, but you can come again, you know—waste not want not. Now take some muffins, do, pray. Batsey, bring some more cream, and set the kidneys on the table, the Yorkshireman is getting nothing to eat. Have a chop with your kidney, werry luxterous—I could eat an elephant stuffed with grenadiers, and wash them down with a ocean of tea; but pray lay in to the breakfast, or I shall think you don’t like it. There, now take some tea and toast or one of those biscuits, or whatever you like; would a little more ‘am be agreeable? Batsey, run into the larder and see if your Missis left any of that cold chine of pork last night—and hear, bring the cold goose, and any cold flesh you can lay hands on, there are really no wittles on the table.
A note should be made regarding the fifteen colour plates included in the book as they were done by a technique that had largely disappeared by 1949. The plates, which are those by Henry Alken originally included in the book back in 1838, were in fact printed in monochrome and individually hand coloured by Maud Johnson who went on the do the same for the further seven volumes Folio printed of Surtees’ works. The Folio Society doesn’t include printing numbers for their books in the various bibliographies they have published but it can be imagined what a huge amount of work this involved for one person, but the effort was worth it as these illustrations really stand out. The pages for the prints are noticeably thicker and stiffer than the pages of text presumably to allow for Johnson’s use of watercolours to do the colouring without distorting the paper. Other than special very limited editions these eight volumes are the last books with hand coloured plates printed in England that I am aware of although I’d love to know of any others. The Folio Society continued to use the original plates throughout the series of reprints which was finally complete in 1956 with this being the only one illustrated by Alken, most of the others are done by John Leech.
Originally published by Hutchinson in 1962 and reprinted as a paperback by Penguin in 1965 this is now really more of a historical document a a lot of ‘The London Nobody Knows’ could really be retitled ‘The London Nobody Knew’ if reprinted today as quite a lot of what is featured no longer exists or has changed so dramatically as to be unrecognisable. For example the chapter dedicated to Islington refers to bomb damaged buildings and shops still in need on preservation, definitely not the case nowadays where in 2024 the average price for a terraced house there was £1,600,000 and a semi detached home getting on for 2 million pounds. I love the fact that Islington could be regarded as part of London nobody knows.
The book marks the beginning of the over thirty years Fletcher wrote and illustrated a diary column for the Daily Telegraph newspaper. As a young man in 1945 at the end of WWII he came to London to study at the famous Slade School of Fine Art and later at the Bartlett School of Architecture and brought his knowledge and art ability to the fore in his columns and his books. He died in 2004 at the age of eighty one back in his birthplace of Bolton and wrote, along with his newspaper work, at least thirty books of which this was the second. Of the books I have found listed two thirds are about London and almost all the rest are about how to paint and draw so he was dedicated to his subject and it shows in this delightful volume. There are two very different styles to the forty two drawings included, three of which are of the cast iron gents toilets in Star Yard, Holborn which I’m pleased to say is still there as a remnant of Victorian plumbing although no longer functional. I have chosen two illustrations to show both the finished drawings and what must really be regarded as sketches, the first being St Anne’s church in Limehouse, one of three churches he describes in that locality, another being Christ Church, in Spitalfields which he comments is in danger of demolition but is definitely still standing today and in regular use.
The title of the book has had a few dissenters over the years as ‘The London Nobody Knows’ is somewhat condescending to the many hundreds of thousands of people that live in the parts of London featured and know all too well in some cases. Whilst researching this article I found one comment that it should have been called ‘The London Nobody Who Reads The Telegraph Knows’ as it mainly covers parts of London that the more wealthy readers of that newspaper would have frequented although now of course a lot of it has been gentrified over the years.
Sadly the building I chose to demonstrate the more sketch like drawings, the Grand Palais Yiddish Theatre on Commercial Road, Whitechapel, was a bingo hall by 1962 when the book was written and was demolished in 1970. Whilst admiring the artistry of the more finished drawings I love the sketches as he captures the life of the people around the featured properties and you feel more drawn in. The suggested perambulations to find the buildings, or even lampposts and signs covered in the text are also a joy to read.
Annoyingly much as I would love to know where that multicoloured lamp is on the front cover, neither the photographer nor their subject is credited in the book, something at the time that Penguin Books were all to prone to do. Two years after my copy was published there was a documentary film of the same name based on the book where actor James Mason wanders round some of the places featured and parts of this are available on youtube including this bit about The Roundhouse, now a major music venue,and illustrated in the Camden Town chapter of the book.
Supercargo is a penetrating and wickedly funny study of a way of life and travel that refuses to die.
That’s what it says on the back cover anyway, I can only assume that whichever marketing person wrote that had had a very generous liquid lunch beforehand and probably hadn’t read the book. There is very little that is actually very funny or even mildly amusing about this book, instead McCamish seems to spend most of his time moaning about how bad the journeys he makes are and the lack of the romance of foreign ports. I did make it to the end to see if it improved but it was a struggle where I abandoned the book several times, which is a pity as up until now I have loved the books from the now defunct Lonely Planet Journeys series.
There are actually three journeys described in the book, the first being a bit of a cheat bearing in mind the books subject as it starts with a flight from London and then uses normal passenger ferries on the western Mediterranean Sea to travel from the south of France to Tunisia and then onto Italy where he bounces around the coast, rather than the cargo vessels implied in the title. The second trip again starts with a flight but does at least use a cargo ship but is also in the Mediterranean although in its eastern side from Italy to Greece then Lebanon, Syria and Turkey before returning to Italy. Nowadays Lebanon and Syria suggest a little danger but this was the year 2000, four years after I visited both countries and they were perfectly safe if a little infuriating when trying to get documentation stamped for onward trips. It should be noted, for those people unfamiliar with the concept, that it used to be quite common for cargo ships to carry passengers and they had cabins of varying quality specifically to do this, with the passengers normally eating with the officers. I remember advertisements for travelling on the ‘banana boats’ across the Atlantic and was very tempted but these were fast ships with luxury offerings and were beyond my means. McCamish was therefore travelling on the very tail end of what was a ‘normal’ way to get around before widespread commercial air travel and the reduction in cargo crew sizes with the corresponding shrinking of superstructure meaning passenger cabins are rarely even included in a modern cargo ship.
I was therefore looking forward to a description of a now largely vanished means of travelling around the world, although it is still possible see here, and to find only the third trip to involve any sort of real distance and that one he missed two possible posts to catch, only eventually reaching the ship at the Canary Islands after flying from the bottom of Italy. This journey consisted of travel on two ships, one down the west coast of Africa to Cape Town with no stops, the second took him along the east African coast to India from Mauritius (which he got to by plane) via Madagascar, Tanzania, Zanzibar and Kenya. This last trip had a captain that really didn’t like the idea of passengers, or possibly this passenger in particular, and frankly I was pretty fed up of McCamish by now and his descriptions of miserable travelling conditions at sea interrupted by brothels and bars on land. I’m sure there is a great book out there about travelling on cargo vessels but this isn’t it. At the end McCamish admits whilst preparing to leave India “Then I would board my plane for the last leg of a sea journey which must have set the record for air miles covered by someone writing about the sea.”
Ramblings on my bookshelves 