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LibriVox recording of Faces and Places by Henry W. Lucy. Read by Ruth Golding. (Re-recorded February, 2010)

Faces and Places is a collection of articles on nineteenth century travel, events and personalities by the British journalist Henry Lucy, who wrote for the Daily News, a London newspaper. His open letter To Those About to Become Journalists rings as true today as when it was written.

The travel tales A Night on a Mountain, Oysters and Arcachon, Easter on Les Avants, and Mosquitoes and Monaco provide an entertaining view of the Victorian Englishman in Europe. "Fred" Burnaby includes a lively account of a balloon trip as well as a biography of the Victorian soldier and adventurer, while Night and Day on the Cars in Canada relates Lucy's experiences of rail travel.

Three of the pieces, Peggotty and Ham, A Cinque Port, and Christmas Eve at Watts's, concern the county of Kent, where Lucy had a country house at Hythe. Christmas Eve at Watts's throws an interesting light on Dickens' short story The Seven Poor Travellers.

Other articles are of historical interest: A Wreck in the North Sea is an account of the wreck of the ship "Deutschland" in 1875; A Historic Crowd describes the massive popular interest in the 1871 trial of the Tichborne Claimant; The Battle of Merthyr contains an eye-witness account of the Merthyr Riots of 1831; The Prince of Wales paints a portrait of the future King Edward VII.

Lucy, who also wrote as "Toby, M.P." for the satirical magazine Punch, loved to poke gentle fun, particularly at the establishment, and this is especially evident in A Peep at an Old House of Commons.

This eclectic collection, mostly affectionately humorous, but with moments of great pathos, was originally published in 1892 in The Whitefriars Library of Wit & Humour. (Summary by Ruth Golding)

For further information, including links to online text, reader information, RSS feeds, CD cover or other formats (if available), please go to the LibriVox catalog page for this recording.

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