The Old Road : H Belloc : Kent, Winchester to Canterbury : Scare in Jacket 1921

The Old Road

By H Belloc

Published by Constable, London, 1921. Hardback book with original dust jacket. Green cloth boards gilt stamped, pp xii, 296 pages. With 16 b&w illustrations and a map at the rear

CONDITION
A very good early copy and scarce in the original jacket. The dust jacket is in very good condition with just a few small archival repairs to the inside. Boards and spine in very good clean condition. All contents present and pages very clean throughout. Small neat inscription to front endpaper. Overall a very good copy.

The Anglo-French writer Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc (1870-1953) remains best known today as the author of the 1907 `Cautionary Tales for Children’ with its often comically violent accounts of what happens to misbehaving youngsters. Belloc, son of a French father and English mother, produced more than 150 books, and lived most of his life in London or West Sussex. He was the Member of Parliament for Salford for the Liberal Party from 1906 to 1910, and a lifelong devout Catholic. His interpretation of his religion compelled him to oppose the suffragette movement, despite the face it was something passionately supported by his mother.

Belloc’s link with Kent is through one book, but an influential one. `The Old Road’ was published in 1904, This described the route of the trackway from the coast of Winchester to Canterbury. The route Belloc described himself as travelling ran through Farnham, and then close by Dorking, Reigate and Redhill, before coming to Otford within Kent, Kemsing, Wrotham, Trottiscliffe,  Snodland, Detling, Lenham, Charing and finally via Chilham to the destination. Belloc’s argument for why the old road existed, and what its origins were, is conveyed in a storybook way. Imagining a man coming in prehistoric times from the continent across the waters from the modern day French coast, Belloc speculates:

    `The wind might fail him, or the wind might so increase that he had to run before it. Did it fail him he would be caught by the flood tide some miles from the land. He cold drift up along the English shore, getting a few hundred miles nearer with every catspaw and looking impatiently for some place to which he could steer. The dip in the cliffs at Dover would give him a chance perhaps. If he missed that he would round the South Foreland.’

(Loc : Blue Shelves 2, Top)