TRAVEL IN ENGLAND

Press, Volume LXXXVIII, Issue 26633, 19 January 1952, Page 3

TRAVEL IN ENGLAND

Jrarneys in England. An Anthology Edited by Jack Simmons, Professor of History, University College, Leicester. Odhams. 288 pp. A Little Book of London. By John Anderson. Oxford University Press. 60 pp. Professor Simmons’s anthology of travel in England provides excellent and entertaining reading matter for, the Christmas season, when a book that can be dipped into anywhere with pleasure, rather than one that demands sustained reading, is often welcome. In an introduction he gives a brief historical account of the main methods of travel in England through the centuries. The passages he chooses in the anthology are the work of both famous ana obscure authors: they range from Hazlitt’s essay “On Going a Journey” complete, extracts from Cobbett. de Quincey, Lamb and Horace Walpole to the reminiscences of the guard of a coach and notes jotted down during a journey in a balloon. Poetry is included as well as prose—worasworth returns home for the long ■acetion. Don Juan enters London. Fictitious journeys have their place only where the characters are fictitious but the circumstances described are real. The main emphasis is laid on [ he period 1760-1860. which saw the great opening up of England to travelers- Many amusing anecdotes are collected, and the extracts are well arranged for variety of style and related themes. Sixteen illustrations are mcuded. *

Mr Anderson’s little book is a description of contemporary London which will teach the traveller—or aven the old-established resident —how jo find more than he might discover jur himself in casual walks through “iccadillv. round about the Bank, or “ the Parks. He takes his reader along the historic highways leading io the city, on and off the road to lyburn. and through Royal Westminster, skilfully threading his way from one building to another and one cenhiry to another. It is difficult to encompass so much in so small a book; the secret of it seems to be not to “®ep to the point. “You see how hard h is when ‘Londoning’ to keep to one nne of thought,” comments Mr Anderson. “We were thinking of the bomb camage and the rebuilding near the wand. But it is the nature of the game: allevs give on to squares: an j-'ghteenth-century memorial in a Poky corner, and round another cor- £,? r a twentieth-century panorama, ine discursive method he has adoptwith order within the disorderliJ>ess, is well adapted to the nature of subject