Shorter notices
Love ana Drollery: a Selection oi Amatory, Merry and Satirical Verse of the Seventeenth Century edited by John Wardroper (Routledge and Kegan Paul 45s). Mr Wardroper's is a pleasant anthology of 'smutty,' merry and satiri- cal verse from songbooks, manuscripts and rare books. The general quality of the verse is not high—nor does Mr Wardroper pretend that it is —but it is useful to be able to see how occa- sional literature changed through the century and-under the impact of puritanism. It seldom reaches the excellence of Cotton's 'Epitaph on a Whore': 'And now her memory pursue/With such a superstitious lust/That I could fumble with her dust,' and much of it is banal; but it is never less than sociologically or historically revealing.
Charles Booth's London selected and edited by Albert Fried and Richard W. Elman (Hutchin- son 50s). Engels, Mayhew, Marx, Carlyle: Victoria's England, nearly fifty years after her accession, was developing a social conscience. Booth's statistical breakdown of poverty in Lon- don was undertaken in the hopes of proving that the situation was being exaggerated. In 1889
Life and Labour of the People in London
was published, and made it clear that far from being exaggerated, previous reports were frighteningly short of the truth. Messrs Fried and Elman have compressed this huge pioneering opus into a single, highly readable volume, a worthy tribute to the detached com- passion of Booth and his assistant Beatrice Potter—the future Mrs Webb.
Previous page
