With the exception of the last three sketches, the pieces composing
these two volumes were written during the author's confinement, for
"conspiracy," in Stafford gaol, merely, as a relief from the intenser
thought exercised in the composition of his "Prison-Rhyme,"—"The
Purgatory of Suicides,"—already published. Higher merit than
naturalness combined with truth is not claimed for any of the stories:
they are, simply, such as any man may write who has the least power of
pourtraying the images which human life, in some of its humblest, least
disguised forms, has impressed on his memory,—while the heart has
formed no attachment sufficiently powerful to seduce the judgment into
a decision, that it is either wise or honest to hide these images from
the observance of others. Nearly all the homely characters sketched
are real,—some of them, in their very names; and the few adventures
allotted to them, are devoid of romance and intricacy, because they
seldom exceed fact.
The "_Old_ Lincolnshire," so often mentioned in these simple pieces,
and endeared to the writer of them by the associations of thirty
years of his life, is likely soon to disappear before the social
changes of that _New_ Lincolnshire which railway "civilisation"
will summon into existence:—would that the manufacturing-misery of
the modern Leicestershire, outlined in two or three uncoloured and
painfully-veritable pictures, might, as speedily, evanish!
Of the three concluding sketches, the writer feels it right to state
that the first is merely a slight alteration of a series of paragraphs
furnished to the _Stamford Mercury_, in 1838, and records strict facts
which were then occurring in Lincolnshire; while the two remaining
fragments were intended to form parts of a novel, in some degree
autobiographical,—but the completion of which was relinquished, at
first, from a toilful engagement with the sterner business of life, and
at length from a growing preference for other subjects.
_134, Blackfriars' Road,
London, Nov. 1. 1845._
CONTENTS
OF
THE FIRST VOLUME.