- 1987 edition. 224 pages
- Published by The Bodley Head, London
- Hardcover with dust jacket. Brown boards
- Very good condition. Minor shelf wear.
Foreword by P.J. Kavanagh. Illustrated and Indexed.
In one of the chapters of A Shepherd's Life W.H. Hudson tells how the idea for the book originated - "It came to me in conversations, at intervals," he says, "during several years with the shepherd. In his long life in his native village, a good deal of it spent on the quiet down, he had seen things it was ... interesting to hear; the things which had interested him, too, at the time, and had fallen into oblivion, yet might be recovered."
The result of this long and patient unravelling is a book packed with information on the rural life of an earlier age, but, first and foremost, it is bursting with life, intense and timeless.
The central character is the shepherd, Caled Bawcombe, whose real name was later revealed to be James Lawes, a shepherd of the parish of Martin, now a Hampshire village but then on the borders of Hampshire, Wiltshire and Doreset (Winterbourne Bishop in the book.)
Caleb Bawcombe, the story of his life and that of the people around him, provide a backdrop for a vivid procession of characters: shepherds and farm labourers, old men and women, the sheep and sheep-dogs who share their lives, the people who live on the finge of the village - gipisies and poachers.
W.H, Hudson's great writing gift knits all these disparate elements together and presents a realistic and intimate view of the Wiltshire countryside and of a way of life with its beauty, but also all the harshness which nature and a bygone social order could inflict on its people.
The characters, their history and the writing are as fresh today as when the book originally appeared in 1910. A Shepherd's Life has charmed readers over several generations and has done much to kindle a genuine interest in nature.
This illustrated edition is a celebration of the landscape Hudson so vividly describes. In a series of specially commissioned watercolours, Benjamin Perkins and others show the Wiltshire of today, while contemporary original works by W. Herbet Allen and many archival photographs record the countryside, its people and their rural activities as they used to be.
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