Lark Rise to Candleford

Book was in good condition - have not had a chance to read -

I am so glad this book is still in print. It is one of my very favorites, and I read it at least once per year, like Huckleberry Finn. For those of us who love nature, and tales of growing up in the out-of-doors, this is a beautiful book of the natural world and agricultural lands. It contains wonderful sketches about farm life in the turn-of-the century English countryside, school life, and village characters. This book reminds me of Cider With Rosie (also called The Edge of Day) by Laurie Lee, another excellent book about growing up in England, set around the time of WWI. This is truly worthwhile reading. If you have read "Lark Rise to Candleford" and enjoyed it, another book by Flora Thompson, "Still Glides the Stream", deals with the same subject matter and is also very good.

LRTC is one of those books that I read almost every year. Why you should ask? There is no other book that provides a view into a time long past as Flora Thompson does in this and her other major work, "Still Glides the Stream". These are works that allow you to see, smell, taste and touch the fabric of a society in full measure. There is nothing maudlin or sentimental in these works, they demonstrate the grinding poverty of the rural poor in the late 19th century when slowly but surely the winds of change were at work to topple once and for all the rigid hierarchy of the Victorian class system. Also lost are the rural traditions and folk life of a people bonded to the earth and its seasonal cycles. Yet at the same time fully demonstrating the quiet joys and happiness that take place within the family of Laura, the main character who is a thinly disguised Flora Thompson. One of the great characters in literature you will meet here is Miss Dorcas Lane, the village postmistress Laura goes to work for. She has the grit, grace and humanity of a Dickens character. Miss Lane also is at the vanguard of a new era, when it's revealed she prefers reading Darwin than suffering the Victorian Bible babble around her. Once encountered, this book will remain a trusted old friend to turn to again and again.

As the previous customer review notes, "Lark Rise to Candleford" fully details life in, alternately, an English hamlet (Lark Rise), a village and a town (Candleford) at the turn of the 20th C. And, as with the prior review, the book is invariably described as a fond recollection of a bygone, uncomplicated era. I value it, though, for the opposite reason, that by describing agricultural life of the last century so accurately and dispassionately, it unintentionally shows such life to be overwhelmingly impoverished, bare and humdrum. In several passages, the author Flora Thompson scolds herself for making the hamlet and village sound so unremittingly dull. Ironically, her protests only underscore the reality of daily existence. One of her most telling observations is about the rarity of drunkenness in Lark Rise, not, as one might infer, because of a higher moral standard, but because no one could afford more than a glass of beer at a sitting. At another point, she describes without editorial the death of noblesse oblige and the resulting hand-to-mouth poverty, unbroken by one-time manor-sponsored holidays and fetes, that accompanied the transition from tenant to wage farming in the latter half of the 19th century. The ultimate strength of this book for me, therefore, is its reminder that, for so many Western people, these really are the good, old days.

This is a depiction of country life in England in the 1870's and 1880's, as seen through the eyes of the author when a young girl.Everyday events are described with much detail, bringing vividly to life the people of a small hamlet.Her family and neighbours were poor, but they made the most of what they had, and lived a simple but satisfying life.As the author grows, she describes a wider world that she experiences, and her wonder at new products and inventions that will eventually change the world.The book is very well written and really brings the period to life.It is superbly read by Judi Dench.It is an excellent book to read to remind us of a time when life was not so complicated and did not have all the pressures that beset us today.