P. J. Kavanagh
In the winter of 1896, on a barrow in Charing Cross Road, a mid-17th-century manuscript found by a scholar was eventually proved to be by Thomas Traherne. This was Centuries of Meditations, short, ecstatic appreciations of this world, this universe, by a Church of England cleric who insists on happiness (‘felicitie’), given us by God if we could only learn to see it. Since then much more Traherne has been discovered, most of it in the same delighted, delightful vein. Happiness and Holiness (Canterbury Press, £19.99) is a selection from the Centuries and from these new finds. It is a sort of Traherne Reader, beautifully and informatively edited by Denise Inge. Traherne was a psychotherapist before the word was invented.
House of Wits by Paul Fisher (Little Brown, £16.99) is a door-stopper, at nearly 700 pages, about the Jameses (Henry, William etc). It was a large family, including a reformed alcoholic father with a cork leg and a brilliant, neurosthenic sister, Alice. Detail is piled upon detail, like a canvas by William Frith, of Civil War America and the years that followed in the United States and in London, so that you learn what they ate as well as what they thought, and how the ships that criss-crossed the Atlantic bearing the large family were furnished. A book for a reader with strong arms who relishes colourful facts.
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