CURRENT LITERATURE
A LONDON HOME IN THE 'NINETIES By M. Vivian Hughes
Older readers in particular will wel- come the third instalment of Mrs. Hughes's delightful autobiography, which covers the last ten years of Queen Victoria's reign (Oxford University Press, 7s. 6d.). She was a teacher, engaged to a schoolmaster who read for the Bar and had to keep her waiting for ten years before they could afford to marry. Meanwhile she was appointed as the first head of the teachers' training department- at Bedford College, with the munificent salary of too,' non- resident. She recalls with quiet humour the difficulties that she had to overcome as a pioneer, with students who could not teach and with authorities who regarded the training of teachers as unnecessary. She pictures, teo, the simple pleasures that poor professional people could have in late Victorian London, such as Irving's acting at the Lyceum, and confesses that her dearest extravagance was a half-crown drive in a hansom cab. Her one exciting adven- ture was a trip to Chicago as an educa- tional conference delegate, when the university there was being built. She also describes a holiday in Switzerland with two whimsical Victorian spinsters who might have come direct from Cranford instead of from a great house in Bloomsbury. Mrs. Hughes's lively portraits of Mary Jane and Henrietta should convince younger readers that Mrs. Gaskell and Trollope did not caricature their heroines.
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