Faces and Places

This collection captures a vanished world through the eyes of a Victorian journalist at the height of the British Empire. Henry Lucy was a fixture of late 19th-century London journalism, and these pieces reveal both the pleasures and prejudices of his era. The travel writing is particularly vivid: a balloon ascent with the daredevil Fred Burnaby, rail journeys across Canada, a night on a Swiss mountain, and bemused encounters with the Riviera's casinos and mosquitoes. Lucy's England emerges just as clearly in pieces about Kent's coastline and a Christmas Eve visit to the painter George Frederic Watts. But it's the open letter "To Those About to Become Journalists" that resonates most unexpectedly, offering practical wisdom that has outlasted the newspaper age that produced it. Lucy writes with the confident authority of a man who knew everyone worth knowing and had been everywhere worth going, yet there's an affectionate warmth beneath his social ease. For readers who savor the texture of daily life in the past, who want to hear a Victorian gentleman think aloud about his world, this collection is a genuine pleasure.