Three Houses, Many Lives
Gillian Tindall
Three Houses, Many Lives
The pages of Gillian Tindall's book teem with pen portraits, from Eugenia Stanhope who sold Lord Chesterfield's scandalous letters, to the autocratic vicar who held the same parish from age 28 to 82, from the just-literate wife of a parish clerk who wrote riddles in his registers, to the cow-keeper who farmed 226 acres in Hornsey till he sold them profitably when the railways came through, The railways bypassed the Cotswold village, famous for its stone-masons, which remains rural to this day; whereas some Surrey inhabitants were, like the Jane Austen characters they resembled, already commuting to London in coaching days. Each house has gone through a series of physical transformations, most of all the seventeenth century merchant's house which eventually became the Conservative Club and then a drinking club for lorry drivers.
3.8 out of 5 based on 4 reviews
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Omniscore:
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| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
History |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
336 |
| RRP |
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| Date of Publication |
June 2012 |
| ISBN |
978-0701185183 |
| Publisher |
Chatto & Windus |
| |
The pages of Gillian Tindall's book teem with pen portraits, from Eugenia Stanhope who sold Lord Chesterfield's scandalous letters, to the autocratic vicar who held the same parish from age 28 to 82, from the just-literate wife of a parish clerk who wrote riddles in his registers, to the cow-keeper who farmed 226 acres in Hornsey till he sold them profitably when the railways came through, The railways bypassed the Cotswold village, famous for its stone-masons, which remains rural to this day; whereas some Surrey inhabitants were, like the Jane Austen characters they resembled, already commuting to London in coaching days. Each house has gone through a series of physical transformations, most of all the seventeenth century merchant's house which eventually became the Conservative Club and then a drinking club for lorry drivers.
Footprints in Paris by Gillian Tindall
Reviews
The Financial Times
Michael Prodger
“Tindall has an imaginative historical sensibility and her way of revisiting the past — as if approaching it through the back door — has both subtlety and poignancy. What she chronicles is not just changing houses but how a prelapsarian world was lost: rural Limpsfield was gobbled up by the commuter belt, the meadows around Stapleton Hall where cattle used to graze were trampled by London’s expansion, and of the 13,000 vicarages and rectories in Britain at the beginning of the 20th century only 5 per cent are in clergy use today. This is local history generalised.”
15/06/2012
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The Literary Review
Frances Spalding
“Gillian Tindall is gifted with an archaeological imagination ... Her interests are both capacious and detailed. Reading this book is an education in many things: the system of ‘Vestry’ or parish administration before the development of local government and regional councils; the management of charitable giving for the poor; the changing face of Anglicanism and the role of the clergy; and the impact of the railways, to name just a handful of examples. There is apparently no line of enquiry that Tindall will not pursue.”
01/06/2012
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The Daily Telegraph
Jane Shilling
“With a detective’s forensic patience and the narrative ear of a novelist, Tindall unpicks the histories of these houses — not especially distinguished, but seething with the loves and hopes and disappointments of the people to whom, like Tindall herself, they were beloved familiar places. Here, if we were to find fault with her book, is its only flaw. The hints she gives of herself, as an unhappy schoolgirl, a young woman, and an adult nursing a dying relation in the Old Vicarage, are tantalising. One longs to know more, and feels sad that these small windows of intimacy are abruptly slammed.”
05/06/2012
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The Evening Standard
Lucy Worsley
“... the bookish equivalent of herbal tea, a subtle, delicate and slightly dotty choice of refreshment … In a sense, this is history mislaid, with so many details and characters lost along the way, the houses themselves barely recognised for what they are, and Tindall herself both present yet absent. Yet this intriguing, imaginative book is still very much my cup of tea.”
15/06/2012
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