Certain Delightful English Towns, with Glimpses of the Pleasant Country Between
1906
William Dean Howells, the man Mark Twain called 'the Lincoln of our letters,' turns his keen literary eye on the English countryside in this enchanting travelogue from 1906. Beginning in Plymouth, where the stones seem to speak of the Pilgrims who sailed to his native America, Howells moves through Exeter, Oxford, Southampton, and London with the unhurried delight of a writer who knows how to look and, more importantly, how to tell what he has seen. His observations blend humor, cultural insight, and a quiet wonder at the strangeness of finding oneself at home in a foreign place. The English, he notes with a wry smile, are wonderfully peculiar in their hospitality. These essays, first published in Harper's Magazine, possess the leisurely grace of a vanished era of travel, when crossing the Atlantic was an event and a month in England worthy of long reflection. Howells captures a Britain that would be transformed forever by the Great War, preserving in prose as elegant as it is accessible a particular moment in time and a particular way of seeing.
