Epping Forest

Its Literary and Historical Associations

by William Addison

J.M. Dent & Sons, 1945, [First Edition], black and white photographic plates, illustrative maps, hardcover, dust jacket

Very Good Condition, some edge and shelf wear, some rubbing and bumping to edges and corners, pencil line on front end paper, dust jacket shows edges and shelf wear with rubbing, bumping, creasing, chipping and tearing to edges, corners, spine and general, sticker to front dust jacket, small parts missing at spine (see photographs)

“This is no formal guide-book to the proud Forest that once covered the greater part of Essex.  Few historians have made more than passing references to the remarkable record of literary associations of Epping Forest, which Mr Addison assembles and reveals to us so vividly against its noble background.
We see the courts of the Tudors and Stuarts hunting and hawking in the Forest; we are introduced to many Elizabethan writers and musicians as they wander down its glades or through its hornbeam thickets.  We meet John Donne, saintly George Herbert, and Izaak Walton as he fishes from the banks of the Lea.  Daniel Defoe describes the flight to Epping from plague-stricken London, and the beginnings of a Forest that belonged not to the court, but to the city.  John Clare watches the famous Easter Hunt, and writes: ‘I love the Forest and its airy bounds’; Tennyson in his long blue cloak skates on the ponds at High Beach, and Hogarth paints the gay assembly at Wanstead House.  William Morris looks back to the country round Walthamstow as he saw it as a boy and describes it in his vision of a new England, while Dickens immortalizes the ‘King’s head,’ Chigwell, in Barnaby Rudge.  These, and many others, come close to the reader as he sees them in the setting of the living forest.
This book is for all who love England, and particularly Essex, inspiring the reader to explore again the places described.”