H.E. Bates Companion

Bates reviews Village England, by Sir William Beach Thomas, finding it a good companion to the author's previous work but also noting that its brief survey of the English village is one-sided: "His villages are earthly paradises, little Edens, and the ugly village, as common in fact as the lovely one, has no place in his book at all. Similarly the mean or degenerate or suspicious countryman has no place." Bates wrote his Country Life columns originally as a substitute for Beach, who was its regular author. In the London Mercury (June, 1935, p. 183).