Wheelwright and son and grandson of wheelwrights, George Sturt (by
real profession an author) passed his innocent boy- hood in a stuffy little stationer's shop in the somnolently peaceful—almost eighteenth-century—atmosphere of the comfortable and respectable town of Farnham, in Surrey. Could there be (some might ask) anything duller than the record of a little boy's life passed in such surroundings ? Read A Small Boy in the Sixties (Cambridge University Press, ,10s. 6d.), and see how a chronicle of " undistinguished nobodies " (to quote from a letter of the author's) can show what " normal English have got in 'em." In this book Mr. Sturt has done for a little country town what Richard Jefferies did for the countryside of Wiltshire. And done it much in the same way, by accurate and detailed record of human trifles, infused with a vivid imagination and a seeing eye, and set out in a beautiful limpid prose. Indeed, singularly reminiscent of Jefferies is Sturt's " This was to come—all this ; with feelings as if Robin Hood might be under the next oak ; or with sound .of wood pigeons in the elms, or sight of squirrels or murmur of summer flies far up amongst the tree branches—' Midsummer 'urn,' as a man said when I invited him to hearken to it." (It only wants Jefferies to add : " There was a hum under the oak by the hedge, a hum in the pinewood, a humming among the heath and dry grass. The air was alive and merry with sound.") As is the manner, so is the matter, and Sturt writes of fairs, bonfires, lamp- lighters, home-brewed ale, neighbours and folk-lore of the town, though at times he takes us out of it and into the hop- grounds and the Bishop's Meadows, and the billowy uplands of Farnham Park. All of it is a real transcript of life. " Quaint- ness " and sentimentality he abhorred ; truth he worshipped and recorded ; and the result is a piece of undying economic history. But it is much more than that : it is, in the phrase of Mr. Arnold Bennett, who writes a preface to his dead friend's book, " authentic literature."
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