Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country

by Alexander Smith

contains 12 essays: Dreamthorp, On the Writing of Essays, On Death and the Fear of Dying, William Dunbar, A Lark's Flight, Christmas, Men of Letters, On the Importance of a Man to Himself, A Shelf in My Bookcase, Geoffrey Chaucer, Books and Gardens and On Vagabonds.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Classics

296 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1863

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base. This is Alexander^^Smith

Alexander Smith was a Scottish poet, labelled as one of the Spasmodic School, and essayist.

Reviews

[Joseph]

I came to this collection of essays many years ago when I stumbled across the line, "Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine," (chapter 1, page 11), which was necessarily unreferenced in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 when a book tumbles open into Mantagu's hands and he sees those words that stick into his mind before the book tumbles with the rest into a growing fire. All these years they had stuck in MY mind as well and I finally hunted its origins down to this late Victorian, queer, two shots shy of being a real classic in literature collection of essays from one who, apparently, was believed to have great things in store for the literary world, but this was all he produced and then died young? Or gave up writing? I don't know. Part of the problem with this collection is that it's so hard to fit into a mold. The first essay, Dreamthorp, and the next one, On the Writing of Essays, sets the volume up to be a short of sublime blend between essays and autobiography grounded in a particular, almost dream-like ideal place. He seems to promise to stitch all of his essays together in this frame work of living and breathing in this particular place and what that means. The book is to be about what Dreamthorp IS and what it MEANS. At least that was my expectation, like Winesburg, Ohio, or of course, Bradbury's similar Martian Chronicles, both examples of fiction works whose stories were only tangentially pieced together by the place that they were set in. I expected the same for this, and perhaps if it would have tried to do something like this, it would have been an ambitiously crafted series. As it stands, it is all over the place. Entire essays could be taken out with no effect to the whole and placed in literary journals. After lovingly introducing the town, he blithely ignores it, staying in his room writing about the literary past, like any old, excuse me, fart would do. So after a while, he becomes less and less radical as he continues.

Luckily he has some beautiful moments. Here the part selected that Bradbury pulled his sentence from:

This place suits my whim, and I like it better year after year. As with everything else, since I began to love it I find it gradually growing beautiful. Dreamthorp--a castle, a chapel, a lake, a straggling strip of gray houses, with a blue film of smoke over all--lies embosomed in emerald. Summer, with it's daisies, runs up to every cottage door. From the little height where I am now sitting, I see it beneath me. Nothing could be more peaceful. The wind and the birds fly over it. A passing sunbeam makes brilliant a white gable-end, and brings out the colours of the blossomed apple-tree beyond, and disappears. I see figures in the street, but hear them not. The hands on the church clock seem always pointing to one hour. Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine. I make a frame of my fingers, and look at my picture. On the walls of the next Academy's Exhibition will hang nothing half so beautiful.

He is Wordsworth or Thoreau! A beautiful landscape painter who needs only an excuse to wake up in the morning and observe. But, in the end, he is more content to consume the works of man and nature than to make any himself. And so it's an odd volume. Obviously a pretty talented writer who is drowned in the works of the past, wanting nothing more than to go two or three hundred years ago back in time, or in loo of that, gaze lovingly at his books, which he never grows tired of. In this, he seems a little naive, a little regressive...he is not a very profound thinker. In all, he gives us essays on, Dunbar, Chaucer, the fear of death, Winter, his bookshelf, why trees are his favorite things, the importance of public executions, and the virtues of being a "vagabond.". He's ALL over the place, but perhaps that is just it. He refuses any easy description. The book is a presentation of bare existence. Not art. Not profound meditations. Just proof that he was there, thinking, breathing, writing...

[Natalie Johansen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alexander Smith is amazing, and his essays are superb. Smith's "Dreamthorp" is actually Linlithgow, Scotland. I thought he might have over-romanticized Linlithgow until I actually visited the town. It's as peaceful and lovely as he describes it, and this collection of essays is equally peaceful and lovely.

[Leila Bathke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a descriptive, amazing essay. My soul's greatest enjoyment is to bask in literature depicting the "Dreamthorp"'s of life :)