Just William is the first book of children's short stories about a young schoolboy named William Brown, written by Richmal Crompton, and published in 1922. She wrote 38 other William books between 1922 and 1970. The first two William books can be found online at Project Gutenberg: Just William, More William, and many of the others are available from Book Depository.

A "Just William" television series was produced in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1990s, with the BBC creating four new episodes again last year (these will be released on DVD in the UK March 2011). 

Below are the episodes from 1994 with links to those that are currently available online.

Series One:

• William and the Russian Prince
• William's Busy Day
• William - The Great Actor
• William and the White Elephants
• Finding a School for William
• William's Birthday

Series Two:

• William Clears The Slums
• Parrots for Ethel
• William's Truthful Christmas
• Boys Will Be Boys
• William and the Ebony Hair-Brush
• William and the Old Man in the Fog
• William Turns Over a New Leaf

Alice Bailly (February 25, 1872 – January 1, 1938) was a radical Swiss painter, known for her interpretation of cubism and her multimedia wool paintings. Biography

I seem to be on an unusually intense book buying/acquiring spree this month, despite my intentions to stick to eBooks for awhile!

Here's some of what arrived this past week:

• I purchased Blitz Spirit after spotting it at Roses Over a Cottage Door. It's a small yet interesting anthology of writing and photography pertaining to the Blitz of 1940-1.
• While Googling "The Lambeth Walk" (don't ask!), I encountered this blog and learned about Britain's Mass Observation project (at the very bottom of the aforementioned blog/page). This led me to purchase Britain by Mass Observation, as well as a whole slew of other books that haven't arrived yet. While the book is not really something you can read directly from cover-to-cover, I've been enjoying bits of it from time to time and find it altogether fascinating.
• I found Serving the Good and the Great: The Amazing True Story of Violet Liddle while searching for something or other via Google Books. This came right on the heels of reading One Pair of Hands by Monica Dickens and watching Upstairs Downstairs (on YouTube, I couldn't wait for the US debut!). The book's description, from the back cover: "Violet Liddle’s charming account offers glimpses into another world and another time—into the private lives of the good and the great. She recounts her fascinating experiences as she served as parlour-maid to George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill before and during World War II..."
• Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World was discovered whilst researching the author's Mass Observation-based books, though this particular volume has nothing to do with the group.

• The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm was an Amazon recommendation and, better yet, a bargain book (though curiously, the price seems to have gone back up!). As it fits in so well with my reading plans for the year, I hope to be starting on this soon.
• England As You Like by Susan Allen Toth was obtained via Paperback Swap because it sounded like a good sort of rainy day book.
• After reading snippets from At Home: A Short History of Private Life on the lovely Ancient Industries blog, I knew I had to buy it. Since I'm a huge fan of Bill Bryson's work, I can't wait to read this!
• I have dovegreyreader to thank for pointing out Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination and I stumbled across The Virago Book of Woman and the Great War while putting this list together.
• I found Lilibet: An Intimate Portrait of Elizabeth II at my favorite thrift store. Coincidentally, I had just spotted it on Amazon the day before, so I was pleased to find an inexpensive like-new copy.

• I Know How to Cook was another purchase inspired by my reading of One Pair of Hands by Monica Dickens. Early in the book she makes several references to checking her French cookery books for recipes (and also Mrs. Beeton's, which is on it's way). That led me to this book, the "bible of French home cooking" which was first published in 1932 and has been re-introduced in translation by one of my favorite food bloggers, Clotilde Dusoulier. It's a rather intimidating volume, at 976 pages and just a little over 5 pounds, but so much fun to browse!

Dorothy: A Publishing Project

The Folio Society


I owe my discovery of More Pick of Punch and the Folio Society to Roses Over a Cottage Door. When I couldn't find the book on Amazon, I went off in search of it and ended up joining the Folio Society (their divine set of rainbow fairy books persuaded me). Ironically, in the end, I had to purchase a copy of the Punch book on eBay as it appears to be unavailable to Folio Society members in the US.

Dictation, often largely adopted as a method of teaching, is really only a method of testing spelling. A child who makes no mistakes learns nothing from it. Still, dictation, employed, like oral spelling, with moderation and intelligence, is a useful and necessary exercise. It may be made an incentive for the careful study of all the hard words in a given 'piece,' and it shows what pupils and what words call for special attention.







(From The Art of Teaching by David Salmon, 1898)


Suggestions to Teachers: One dictation exercise constitues a day's lesson;  but, in addition, assign three or four words from the review lists which follow every fourth lesson. When the four dictations and the review have been taught, review the week's work and teach no new matter. Keep a list of the words misspelled daily, and on Friday drill on these.

• The Modern Speller, Book 1 by Kate van Wagenen
• The Modern Speller, Book 2 by Kate van Wagenen
• Dictation Day by Day, A Modern Speller, 3rd Year by Kate van Wagenen
• Dictation Day by Day, A Modern Speller: 4th Year by Kate van Wagenen
• Dictation Day by Day, A Modern Speller: 5th Year by Kate van Wagenen
• Dictation Day by Day, A Modern Speller: 6th Year by Kate van Wagenen

"Every man is an inexhaustible treasury of human personality. He can go on burrowing in it for an eternity if he has the desire - and a taste for introspection. I like to keep myself well within the field of the microscope, and, with as much detachment as I can muster, to watch myself live, to report my observations of what I say, feel, think. In default of others, I am myself my own spectator and self-appreciator - critical, discerning, vigilant, fond! --- I never cease to interest myself in the Gothic architecture of my own fantastic soul." (The Journal of a Disappointed Man)

This week I read The Journal of a Disappointed Man by W.N.P. Barbellion, my third book for 52 Books in 52 Weeks. The Journal was recently re-published by Little Toller Books in the UK and is also available in the public domain via Google Books and the Internet Archive. It has been called a "masterpiece of personal observation," likened to the work of writers such as Franz Kafka and James Joyce, and was described by Ronald Blythe as "among the most moving diaries ever created."

W.N.P. Barbellion was the nom-de-plume of Bruce Frederick Cummings (7 September 1889 - 22 October 1919). The initials W.N.P. stood for Wilhelm Nero Pilate, whom the author thought to be the most despicable people in history (Wilhelm being Kaiser Wilhelm the II since the diaries were published during the First World War). Barbellion was a name above a shop in South Kensington that Cummings passed every day.

The Journal begins in 1903 when the author is 13 years old. His brother would later recall:

"He read all kinds of books, from Kingsley to Carlyle, with an insatiable appetite. It was about this time, too, that he began those long tramps into the countryside, over the hills to watch the staghounds meet, and along the broad river marshes, that provided the beginnings and the foundation of the diary habit, which became in time the very breath of his inner life.

In these early years, I remember, the diary took the outward form of an old exercise book, neatly labelled and numbered, and it reflected all his observations on nature. The records, some of which were reproduced from time to time in The Zoologist, were valuable not only in their careful exactitude, but for their breadth of suggestion, and that inquiring spirit into the why of things which proved him to be no mere classifier or reporter. They were the outcome of long vigils of concentrated watching."

He taught himself how to dissect, and afterwards his patient and unerring skill surprised his examiners. "Scientists and naturalists of repute--reading his published records of observations--called upon him and were puzzled to find him a mere boy." By the time he was fourteen, "his fixed determination to become a naturalist by profession was accepted by all of us as a settled thing." (A.J. Cummings, A Last Diary)

Despite being almost entirely self-taught, in October 1911 he placed first in an examination for a position at the British Museum of Natural History in London, and in January 1912 commenced an assistantship there.


"For an unusually long time after I grew up, I maintained a beautiful confidence in the goodness of mankind. Rumours did reach me, but I brushed them aside as slanders. I was an ingénu, unsuspecting, credulous." (The Journal of a Disappointed Man)

Gradually, as his ambitions began to change, his writing evolved from the dry scientific notes of the earlier Journal into something more personal and literary (and hence, imminently more readable!).

"He wrote down instinctively and by habit his inmost thoughts, his lightest impression of the doings of the day, a careless jest that amused him, an irritating encounter with a foolish or a stupid person, something newly seen in the structure of a bird's wing, a sunset effect. It was only on rare occasions that he deliberately experimented with forms of expression." (A.J. Cummings, A Last Diary)

There is an element of despair throughout the Journal as he struggled with chronic ill-health (and a fair amount of hyperchondria), and also occasional bouts of depression. "Chronically sub-normal" was how he once described his condition to his brother. In London, he grew slowly and steadily worse and, upon the advice of his brother saw a "first-class nerve specialist" who promptly diagnosed him with what we now call multiple sclerosis. Yet the decision was made not to tell him the true nature of his illness, so as not to precipitate his demise.

In October of 1914, he discovered the Journal of the Russian painter Marie Bashkirtseff (1858–1884). “I am simply astounded," he writes. “It would be difficult in all the world’s history to discover any two persons with temperaments so alike. She is the ‘very spit of me’!”  This seems to have inspired his decision, in December of that year, to "prepare and publish a volume of this Journal."

The diaries, up through the winter of 1917 were eventually published in March 1919 and the book was an immediate sensation (though many believed it was a work of fiction, written by H.G. Wells who had written book's preface). A later journal entitled A Last Diary was published after his death in 1919, as well as a book of essays, Enjoying Life and Other Literary Remains.

"I do not think that there can be two minds about the great literary qualities and the poignant interest of his one tragic work. It is a book that is continually sought and steadily reprinted – the story of a soul in the grip of the obscure and pitiless arterial [sic] disease that finally killed him, resolved to find expression and a use for itself in the ever darkening shadow of death. 'Barbellion’s Diary' I am convinced will still be read with interest, curiosity and sympathy, when most of the larger more fluid successes of to-day have passed out of attention." (H. G. Wells, letter to Barbellion’s widow, 8 September 1925, Source)

"For as long as his remarkable journal is published he will live with it, his constrained existence celebrated for the courage that so brightly distinguishes it." (William Trevor, “On the Shelf”, Sunday Times, 5 November 1995, Source)

"To me the honour is sufficient of belonging to the universe — such a great universe, and so grand a scheme of things. Not even Death can rob me of that honour. For nothing can alter the fact that I have lived; I have been I, if for ever so short a time. And when I am dead, the matter which composes my body is indestructible—and eternal, so that come what may to my 'Soul,' my dust will always be going on, each separate atom of me playing its separate part — I shall still have some sort of a finger in the pie. When I am dead, you can boil me, burn me, drown me, scatter me — but you cannot destroy me: my little atoms would merely deride such heavy vengeance. Death can do no more than kill you." (The Journal of a Disappointed Man)

This week I had planned to begin reading The Edwardians, Vita Sackville-West's 1930 critique of Edwardian aristocratic society. However, Juliet Nicolson's introduction to the book distracted me with its descriptions of Knole and left me wanting to know more. Knole was Vita Sackville-West's birthplace - the home she passionately loved, and the setting for much of The Edwardians, as well as Virginia Woolf's Orlando.

Thanks to Kindle, so perfect for these impulse purchases (and thus, rather dangerous!), within minutes I was reading Inheritance: The Story of Knole and the Sackvilles by Robert Sackville-West instead. This was my second book for the 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge.

First, the book's description from Amazon UK:

Since its purchase in 1604 by Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset, the house at Knole, Kent, has been inhabited by thirteen generations of a single aristocratic family, the Sackvilles. Here, drawing on a wealth of unpublished letters, archives and images, the current incumbent of the seat, Robert Sackville-West, paints a vivid and intimate portrait of the vast, labyrinthine house and the close relationships his colourful ancestors formed with it. "Inheritance" is the story of a house and its inhabitants, a family described by Vita Sackville-West as 'a race too prodigal, too amorous, too weak, too indolent and too melancholy; a rotten lot, and nearly all stark staring mad'. Where some revelled in the hedonism of aristocratic life, others rebelled against a house which, in time, would disinherit them, shutting its doors to them forever. It's a drama in which the house itself is a principal character, it's fortunes often mirroring those of the family. Every detail holds a story: the portraits, and and all the junk which the subjects of those portraits left behind, point to pivotal moments in history; all the rooms, and the objects that fill them, are freighted with an emotional significance that has been handed down from generation to generation. Now owned by the National Trust, Knole is today one of the largest houses in England, visited by thousands annually and housing one of the country's finest collections of second-hand Royal furniture. It's a pleasure to follow Robert Sackville-West, as he unravels the private life of a public place on a fascinating, masterful, four-hundred-year tour through the memories and memorabilia, political, financial and domestic, of his extraordinary family.

That does indeed pretty well sum up the book and there's not a lot I can add, except to say that I really liked this book. Truth be told, it captured my imagination from the very beginning:

Knole is vast and labyrinthine. It takes a long time to walk from one end of the house ot the other, and the main routes meander through a series of lobbies or come to sudden stops at dead ends. On the way, you encounter the most unexpected juxtapositions: an eighteenth-century fire engine here, a range of cobwebbed classical busts there: a faraway attic room where Victorian wash jugs jostle with Greek pottery; corridors where First World war military uniforms and cavalry boots tumble out of cupboards, phials of laudanum lurk in Victorian medicine chests, and love letters from another age curl on a windowsill. It is the junk, the bits and pieces that people could never bring themselves to throw away that reveal just as much about the past as Knole's unrivalled collection of Tudor and Stuart furniture. (From the Preface.)

From that point I was hooked, and continued along at a brisk pace. I enjoyed all of the mini-biographies, but especially that of Vita's mother, Victoria Josefa Dolores Catalina Sackville-West. I do, personally, wish there'd been a bit more detail about the house itself, and its furnishings, but it was much more of a family history (and I believe that was the point). And of course, pictures...pictures are the major complaint of every review I've encountered, and I would have to agree: there should have been more of them (never mind that on the Kindle, the pictures are so ridiculously tiny that they're almost useless). To fill in the "gaps," I did a little research of my own and have included photos below. More about Knole can also be found here:

• The Visitor's Guide to Knole (1839) by John Henry Brady
• Knole House: Its State Rooms, Pictures & Antiquities (1906) by Baron Lionel Sackville-West
• Knole and the Sackvilles (1922) by Vita Sackville-West