H.E. Bates Companion

Joined by submissions by Adrian Bell, W.H. Davies, V. Sackville-West, Hugh Walpole, and others, Bates writes as much about his grandfather, George William Lucas, as he does about central England, in this tribute to the shoemaking culture prior to factories and country life prior to development. He contrasts the two river valleys and their people, and details the rapid destruction of rural culture that is a theme of so much of his early fiction. He anticipates similar essays in his nature books (for instance "The Twin Rivers" in Down the River) and in the first volume of his autobiography (The Vanished World). In English Country: Fifteen essays by Various Authors (edited by H.J. Massingham, London: Wishart & Co., 1934, pp. 3-17).