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    Over the Bridge: An Essay in Autobiography
    Over the Bridge: An Essay in Autobiography
    Over the Bridge: An Essay in Autobiography
    Ebook296 pages3 hours

    Over the Bridge: An Essay in Autobiography

    By Richard Church

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    About this ebook

    Over the Bridge, the first volume of Richard Church's personal essays, originally published in 1955, takes the reader through the poet's Edwardian childhood adventures. With his detailed descriptions and insightful observations Church paints an idyllic image of his early years passed in the safety of the close-knit lower middle-class home where his loving, hard working parents did all they could to protect their sons from the harsh reality of Britain at the end of the Victorian era. He ponders with humour the disappointments of his first school endeavours; his academic failure made him feel an outcast until it was discovered that not a poor intellectual capacity but rather the child's poor eyesight was to blame for his lack of concentration and understanding of his school subjects. And finally Church takes us through his teenage years, which began happily with a promise of undisturbed literary and artistic pursuits at Camberwell Art School but were soon tainted with worry over the diminishing health of their beloved mother – the pillar of the Church family.


    Over the Bridge is not only a touching portrait of Church's childhood self but also an intriguing and detailed picture of the social and economic realities of the Edwardian era. In 1955 Over the Bridge was awarded the Sunday Times Prize for Literature.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateMar 26, 2015
    ISBN9781448214877
    Over the Bridge: An Essay in Autobiography
    Author

    Richard Church

    Richard Church was born in London in 1893. At the age of sixteen, persuaded by his father, he took a position as a clerk in the Civil Service where he worked for the next twenty-four years. During that time he worked tirelessly on his love of all things literary, devoting early mornings, between 5 and 7, and most of his evenings to writing and reading. In 1917 this hard regime was rewarded and his first volume of poetry, The Flood of Life, and Other Poems, was published. But real success and acclaim came only in 1926 with the publication of Portrait of the Abbot. In 1930 Richard gave up his position with the Civil Service and began a full-time writing career. He died in 1972, with over sixty books of poetry and prose to his name, having firmly established his position in English literary heritage.

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    • 5/5
      I first read this book 50 years ago when doing A level English Lit. Wuthering Heights and Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) made up the required reading. Reading it again at post retirement age I found the book a bit of a page turner, the little bits of Edwardian life at the turn of the 20th century are things that aren't taught in history books. The delicacy of his writing when talking about his mother's sickness and death is excellent. In a more modern age of the internet one can look up (and view) the address his parents moved to in Herne Hill and also the pub where his removal men stopped off for a bit of refreshment. It isn't a thriller, he isn't a real celebrity, there's no plot, it's just the telling of a boy growing up in a different era, part of a loving family observing the world around him.

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    Over the Bridge - Richard Church

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