Come Christmas

A step towards alleviating the general ignorance about Eleanor Farjeon (after whom the Award is obviously named) might be taken by buying this facsimile of her Christmas poems first published in 1927. They will surely seem strange to a public inured to the raucous vulgarity of what we must now call ‘the holidays’ and their naive – not to say sentimental – religiosity may jar. Nevertheless Come Christmas should be commended to present readers for conveying the spirit of its time, whether in its quasi medieval carols or its verses about street children, and that spirit is caught too in the craftsmanlike wood engravings (decently reprinted) by Molly McArthur (aka Florence Mary Anderson). Anne Harvey’s introduction admirably gives a context to the work and its author.

The publishers of Come Christmas, located at the University of Gloucester at Cheltenham, have a distinguished list of similarly unpretentious facsimiles and editions of unpublished or little-known works by well-known writers. One of these is Four and Twenty Blackbirds, Edward Thomas’s 1915 collection of invented anecdotes purporting to explain the source of proverbs like ‘Look Before You Leap’ (1 86174 111 1, £5). Thomas also lingers on the edge of the Press’s most ambitious work: a compilation from Robert Frost’s Derry notebook with quaint storiettes from the time when he and his family made their own magazine: The Bouquet. (Thomas appears to have written two poems for the venture when the Frosts were in England: ‘The Combe’ and ‘Nettles’ – neither so noted in his Collected Poems.) The book is a fairly lavish, clothbound job, illustrated in colour with some of the Frost children’s illustrations for the magazine: As Told to a Child (1 86174 100 6, £25).