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Peculiar People: The Story of My Life
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About the BookThese days, hardly anyone remembers Augustus John Cuthbert Hare (1834–1903). But in his prime, the late Victorian age, his name was on the lips of anyone who mattered. He was a travel writer, a story teller and memoirist of the first order, and his work is a fascinating record of a lost way of life amongst the strangest upper classes of English society. Hare’s six-volume autobiography was published between 1899–1903 in England; Academy’s one-volume condensation first appeared in hardcover in 1995. Walter Kendrick of the Voice Literary Supplement had this to say: “Not only did Hare win dinner invitations from lords and ladies, poets and politicians; he also listened to stories they told after too many glasses of wine. Hare delighted in those stories, which he tidied up and rendered coherent for inclusion in The Story of My Life. “It’s a delightful book, though it’s been out of print since the first edition and couldn’t be reprinted in full now, being too huge and useless for our diminished age. “But the marveously impractical Academy Chicago press has come up with the next best thing: a one-volume, relatively cheap condensation that culls the good stuff out of the blather, both of which Hare provided in plenty. “. . . the best way to read this bizarre book is simply to revel in the strangeness of a man who, like some improbable Amazon insect, could exist in no other time or place than precisely the hothouse that reared him, Victorian England.” Readers will also enjoy the many illustrations by Hare, with additional whimsical drawings by Julia Anderson Miller. Reviews"An invaluable memoir . . . the present volume is attractive and may lead its readers to learn more about a fascinating figure."––Library Journal “How can you not like a memoir entitled ‘Peculiar People,’ especially when its author proves no less peculiar than the assortment of English oddities he memorializes?”—Patricia T. O’Connor, The New York Times Book Review “This [is a] charmingly illustrated volume . . . [Hare] was probably a prig, a snob, and probably a crashing bore, but this book is riveting.”—The New Yorker |
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