BOOKS OF THE DAY
Down The Road
Travel in England. By Thomas Burke. (Batsford. ros. 6d.) MR. BURKE is a very widely read man, and this perhaps is the main pleasure of reading his delightful record of travel in England, from pre-historic track to arterial road. His book abounds in contemporary quotations ; many of them are not the kind one would collect as a result of turning up " Travel " in a library catalogue, but are the incidental and illuminating references that come in works not primarily about travel. Such are the passages from Piers Plowman, Deloney's novels, Farquhar's Beaux Stratagem, Swift's letters, Wesley's Puma!, the eighteenth-century novelists, Haw- thorne's Our Old Home; the anonymous description of John Constable (to illustrate ie bad manners on stage-coaches) as " a gentleman even on a coach journey." Mr. Burke's observations on travel literature are almost as interesting as his record of travel itself. He contrasts the factual, practical note of Arthur Young (1768), speaking his mind plainly on bad roads and inns, with the nostalgia of Birch-Reynardson's Down the Road, written in an age of railways:
You will be able to recall the coachman and the guards, and the very horses you have driven ; the foggy mornings out of London ; the Peacock at Islington ; the pretty barmaid who used to give you your glass of rum and milk ; the cold, snowy days and nights you have passed on the mail or coach ; the guard and his yard of tin on the mail, wakening up the drowsy toll-bar keeper.
Mr. Burke, who does not love trains, points out that there is a very scanty railway literature ; though I should have thought that the fascination of railways for boys, and the literature it has produced, was a point to notice. One of his landmarks for the revival of the road in the 'eighties and 'nineties is the launching of series like Macmillan's " Highways and Byways." He emphasises that the pioneer in this road renaissance was the bicycle, not the car ; it was the agitation of the cycling clubs that put turnpikes into good repair ; then followed pleasure-touring in dog-cart, gig and phaeton.
Mr. Burke is severe on those who talk of " the romance of the road " (though his publishers are guilty, on the dust-cover) and who gush about chivalrous highwaymen ; until the nineteenth century travel was hideously uncomfortable, and the highwayman was an added ugly nuisance. The only Golden Age of the road, he con- siders, was the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, when Telford and Macadam were doing their good work, and coaching became a pleasure in itself : "There was a passion and precision about the whole business of coaching ; something that stirred men's minds and pulses as they are stirred today by the perfect car." Mr. Burke is in sympathy ; he does not believe in the benefits of travel in the sense of bringing people together, but he does believe in the pleasures of a journey. Among Mr. Burke's more topical quotations is Horace Walpole's account of the hurried evacuation of London in March, 175o, on the threat of an earthquake: This frantic terror prevails so much that within these three days
seven hundred and thirty coaches have been counted passing Hyde Park Corner with whole parties removing into the country. . . Several women have made earthquake gowns : that is, warm gowns to sit out of doors all night. These are of the more courageous, One woman, still more heroic, is come to town on purpose ; she says all her friends are in London, and she will not survive them. But, what will you think of Lady Catherine Pelham, Lady Frances Arundel, and Lord and Lady Galway, who go this evening to as inn ten miles out of town, where they are to play at brag till five in the morning, and then come back—I suppose to look for the bones of their husbands and families under the rubbish_ One could go on quoting ; but Mr. Burke is more than a witty anthologist of the road. All the time he keeps in mind the purposes and motives of the traveller and the functions of the roads and so has written a book that while always entertaining is a solid piece of social history.
The 93 illustrations—photographs, prints, engravings, mediaeval manuscripts and woodcuts—reflect Mr. Burke's range and taste as well as his quotations do. The early train prints look as quaint and picturesque as " A Postchaise in Difficulties " or " A Mailcoach Passing Through Flooded Country." But the photographs of " Pioneers of Motoring " or " The First Rolls-Royce " make one grin—either because the car is too near us or because it has never had its Rowlandson, Aiken, or Currier and Ives.
JANET ADAM SMITH.
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