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Afoot in England is a classic English birding/birdwatching volume by W.H. Hudson. Mr. Hudson is a nature lover, but above all a bird lover, and it was his quest for a more intimate acquaintance with the bird life of the English Countryside that led him afoot on many of these birding pilgrimages through un-frequented England, of which he gives us such attractive glimpses. Never before published in America, and long out of print in England. Guide-books are so many that it seems probable we have more than any other country--possibly more than all the rest of the universe together. Every county has a little library of its own--guides to its towns, churches, abbeys, castles, rivers, mountains; finally, to the county as a whole. They are of all prices and all sizes, from the diminutive paper-covered booklet, worth a penny, to the stout cloth-bound octavo volume which costs eight or ten or twelve shillings, or to the gigantic folio county history, the huge repository from which the guide-book maker gets his materials. For these great works are also guide-books, containing everything we want to learn, only made on so huge a scale as to be suited to the coat pockets of Brobdingnagians rather than of little ordinary men

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9781774411667

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William Henry Hudson (4 August 1841 - 18 August 1922) was an author, naturalist, and ornithologist. Hudson was born in Quilmes, near Buenos Aires, Argentina.[a] He was the son of Daniel Hudson and his wife Catherine nee Kemble, United States settlers of English and Irish origin. He spent his youth studying the local flora and fauna and observing both natural and human dramas on what was then a lawless frontier, publishing his ornithological work in Proceedings of the Royal Zoological Society, initially in an English mingled with Spanish idioms. He had a special love of Patagonia. Hudson settled in England during 1874, taking up residence at St Luke's Road in Bayswater.[1] In 1876 he married Emily Wingrave in London. Hudson was a friend of the late nineteenth century English author George Gissing, whom he met in 1889. They corresponded up until the latter's death in 1903, occasionally exchanging their publications, discussing literary and scientific matters and commenting on their respective access to books and newspapers, a matter of supreme importance to Gissing.[2] Towards the end of his life, Hudson moved to Worthing in Sussex, England. His grave is in Broadwater and Worthing Cemetery in Worthing. He produced a series of ornithological studies, including Argentine Ornithology (1888-1899) and British Birds (1895), and later achieved fame with his books on the English countryside, including Hampshire Days (1903), Afoot in England (1909) and A Shepherd's Life (1910), which helped foster the back-to-nature movement of the 1920s and 1930s and was set in Wiltshire. Hudson's best-known novel is Green Mansions (1904), and his best-known non-fiction is Far Away and Long Ago (1918), which was made into a film.

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