Peculiar People: The Story of My life - Hardcover

Augustus Hare

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0897333888 ISBN 13: 9780897333887

Publisher: Academy Chicago Publishers, 2004

Synopsis

These days hardly anyone remembers Augustus John Curthbert 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 storyteller and a 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.

About this title

Book Description:

These days hardly anyone remembers Augustus John Curthbert 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, storyteller, 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 Chicago'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 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 its been out of print since the first edition and couldn't be reprinted in full now, being too huge and useless for our dimished 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 bather, 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 improbale Amazon incest, could exist in no other time or place than precisely the hothouse that reared him, Victorian England."

Readers will also enjoy the many illustration by Hare, with additional whimisical drawings by Julia Anderson-Miller.

From the Back Cover:

Augustus John Cuthbert Hare (1834-1903) was a Victorian writer who had clung, so to speak, to the edges of fame. He was born into the maddest of upper-class English families and survived one of the cruelest of childhoods to write monumental travel guides to the Continent and a six-volume autobiography, The Story of My Life. That autobiography is now extremely rare and growing rarer - since every day copies of it, even in libraries, crumble into dust. This is a one-volume condensation of this remarkable work, containing what the editors consider to be the highlights of Augustus Hare's harrowing tale, beginning with his birth, shortly following which his lackadaisical parents gave him to a relative, assuring her that if she wanted more children she should let them know, because they had others.

About this edition

• Publisher: Academy Chicago Publishers
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0897333888
• ISBN 13: 9780897333887
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 350
• Editor: Anita Miller, James Papp