Lark Rise to Candleford: A Trilogy (Penguin Modern Classics)

Lark Rise to Candleford: A Trilogy (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Editorial Reviews

Flora Thompson's immortal trilogy, containing "Lark Rise", "Over To Candleford" and "Candleford Green", is a heartwarming portrayal of country life at the close of the 19th century. This story of three closely related Oxfordshire communities - a hamlet, the nearby village and a small market town - is based on the author's experiences during childhood and youth. It chronicles May Day celebrations and forgotten children's games, the daily lives of farmworkers and craftsmen, friends and relations - all painted with a gaiety and freshness of observation that make this trilogy an evocative and sensitive memorial to Victorian rural England.

Customer Reviews

Good History Book

Reviewed by William Maudlin, 2009-10-29

I bought this book to see if it was like the TV series.

It was very good and obviously the TV series used the historical descriptions of Laura's childhood to craft the excellent series that so many have come to appreciate.

Many of the characters of the series were based on the real people described by the authoress of this classic. The post mistress and Laura's relatives are there and are rather like those in the TV hit, so it is not altogether unfamiliar territory.

I love history and this is well-written and often compelling reading matter. It gives both a general and a very specific background of the late Victorian period in part of rural England. The little stories and plots used in the Lark Rise to Candleford television series are not in this original work.

It is very good background to the heart-warming series of tales on television. This book has great descriptions of village life, individual characters and traditions. I found it very worth while but if you're looking for the stories or a developing plot you might be disappointed.

One of my favorite classics

Reviewed by Sammy Madison, 2006-03-20

I am so glad this book is still in print. It is one of my very favorites, and I read it at least once per year, like Huckleberry Finn. For those of us who love nature, and tales of growing up in the out-of-doors, this is a beautiful book of the natural world and agricultural lands. It contains wonderful sketches about farm life in the turn-of-the century English countryside, school life, and village characters. This book reminds me of Cider With Rosie (also called The Edge of Day) by Laurie Lee, another excellent book about growing up in England, set around the time of WWI. This is truly worthwhile reading. If you have read "Lark Rise to Candleford" and enjoyed it, another book by Flora Thompson, "Still Glides the Stream", deals with the same subject matter and is also very good.

A literary time machine

Reviewed by Mark Newbold, 2005-12-07

LRTC is one of those books that I read almost every year. Why you should ask? There is no other book that provides a view into a time long past as Flora Thompson does in this and her other major work, "Still Glides the Stream". These are works that allow you to see, smell, taste and touch the fabric of a society in full measure. There is nothing maudlin or sentimental in these works, they demonstrate the grinding poverty of the rural poor in the late 19th century when slowly but surely the winds of change were at work to topple once and for all the rigid hierarchy of the Victorian class system. Also lost are the rural traditions and folk life of a people bonded to the earth and its seasonal cycles. Yet at the same time fully demonstrating the quiet joys and happiness that take place within the family of Laura, the main character who is a thinly disguised Flora Thompson.
One of the great characters in literature you will meet here is Miss Dorcas Lane, the village postmistress Laura goes to work for. She has the grit, grace and humanity of a Dickens character. Miss Lane also is at the vanguard of a new era, when it's revealed she prefers reading Darwin than suffering the Victorian Bible babble around her.
Once encountered, this book will remain a trusted old friend to turn to again and again.

Nostalgia not what it used to be.

Reviewed by Thomas F Wells, 2001-08-17

As the previous customer review notes, "Lark Rise to Candleford" fully details life in, alternately, an English hamlet (Lark Rise), a village and a town (Candleford) at the turn of the 20th C. And, as with the prior review, the book is invariably described as a fond recollection of a bygone, uncomplicated era. I value it, though, for the opposite reason, that by describing agricultural life of the last century so accurately and dispassionately, it unintentionally shows such life to be overwhelmingly impoverished, bare and humdrum. In several passages, the author Flora Thompson scolds herself for making the hamlet and village sound so unremittingly dull. Ironically, her protests only underscore the reality of daily existence. One of her most telling observations is about the rarity of drunkenness in Lark Rise, not, as one might infer, because of a higher moral standard, but because no one could afford more than a glass of beer at a sitting. At another point, she describes without editorial the death of noblesse oblige and the resulting hand-to-mouth poverty, unbroken by one-time manor-sponsored holidays and fetes, that accompanied the transition from tenant to wage farming in the latter half of the 19th century. The ultimate strength of this book for me, therefore, is its reminder that, for so many Western people, these really are the good, old days.

An excellent appreciation of the "old" ways

Reviewed by tdown@sk.sympatico.ca, 1997-12-27

This trilogy was one I read many years ago and only returned to recently. On this reading it was an even better - recalling in detail a life which has totally gone now but has a wonder and joy in it which we can no longer experience. On having her fortune told - the main character was told she would be loved by people she had never met - for once astrology worked. An excellent piece of literature.