Recollections / With Photogravure Portrait of the Author and a number of / Original Letters, of which one by George Meredith and / another by Robert Louis Stevenson are reproduced in / facsimile
David Christie Murray
History
Book language: English
190 pages
Recollections is David Christie Murray's 1908 memoir, moving from his 1847 birth in West Bromwich through a life in Victorian letters. It includes a photogravure portrait and facsimile letters from figures such as George Meredith and Robert Louis Stevenson. Listen for a warm, anecdotal view of nineteenth-century England and literary society.
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Cover of the original edition (Project Gutenberg, public domain).
Text source: gutenberg.org · The work is in the public domain.
Opening of the book
RECOLLECTIONS By David Christie Murray With Photogravure Portrait of the Author and a number of Original Letters, of which one by George Meredith and another by Robert Louis Stevenson are reproduced in facsimile. London John Long Norris Street, Haymarket 1908 Frontispiece-portrait
RECOLLECTIONS CHAPTER I The Unlucky Day of the Fool's Month—High Street, West Bromwich—My First Pedestrian Triumph—The Common English Bracken—The Sense of Beauty. I remember that in a fit of petulance at some childish misdemeanour, my mother once told me that I came into the world on the unlucky day of the fool's month. It was her picturesque way of saying that I was born on the thirteenth of April. I have often since had occasion to think that there was a wealth of prophetic wisdom in the phrase which neither she nor I suspected at the time. I did the world the poor service of being born into it in the year 1847, in a house not now to be identified in the straggling High Street of West Bromwich, which in those days was a rather doleful hybrid of a place—neither town nor country. It is a compact business-like town now, and its spreading industries have defaced the lovely fringe of country which used to be around it. Its great peculiarity to a thoughtful child lay in the fact that even at his small rate of progress he could pass in an hour from the clink, clink, clink on the anvils of the poor nailmakers, who worked in their own sordid back kitchens about the Ling or Virgin's End, to a rural retirement and quiet as complete as you may find to-day about Charlcote or Arden, or any other nook of the beautiful Shakespeare country. Since the great South Staffordshire coal fault was circumvented, nearly all the wide reaches of rural land which I remember are overgrown
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