25 OCTOBER 1930, Page 42

Mr. Alan Stapleton, the author and illustrator of London Lanes

(Lane, 1Ss.), is not an exact student of Dickens, since he asserts that David Copperfield was engaged to Dors Spenlove, Betty Trotwood's niece "—five words and three errors. But he has accumulated a mass of information—not all of it, indeed, of equal value—about the lanes that exist or that have existed in London County, and he has mark careful drawings of many of them. The arrangement of the material seems arbitrary : the author flies from one side of London to another when he comes on two or more lanes with the same name. But there is a full index.