Tiggy walker biography of abraham

[Content warning: Over the Mountain is a novel of its time, and includes elements that modern readers will find offensive. It contains graphic descriptions of physical injury, some of which I quote here in support of points that could not be made without illustrative quotations. Needless to say, I also think it’s a fascinating work of surrealist fantasy, and hope you’ll agree by the time you’ve finished reading!]

The writer-artist Mervyn Peake wrote his short poem, ‘O Heart-Beats’, in 1939, as he waited to be drafted into the army and sent to the front. The poem figures this time of anticipation and dread as a vertiginous cliff beside a silent ocean, at the edge of which the poet stands listening to his body’s internal workings with all the intensity of a compulsive gambler awaiting the outcome of a last throw of the dice:

O heart-beats – you are rattling dice –
My rattling dice
Proclaim the edge of precipice
At whose hid boulders stands a soundless sea –
These dice
Endanger me,
And spice
My days with hazards of futurity.[1]

Ruthven Todd’s novel Over the Mountain, published in the same year, is similarly preoccupied with precipices, precarity, and rocky edges, whose successful navigation is a matter of chance or ‘hazard’ rather than judgment. The narrative is dominated by the mountain of the title, the Pale Peak, whose presence ‘spices’ the existence of the inhabitants of the High Plain beneath. Their eyes are constantly turning towards its heights, their myths are woven around its contours – obscured as they are by snow and cloud – and from time to time their heroes seek to prove themselves by scaling its precipitous slopes (though none of them, at the time the story begins, has been known to reach the top). The vast range of which it forms part cuts off the known world of the protagonist from the world beyond; no one has any idea what lies on the other side. For Todd, as for Peake, cliffs mark the boundaries between known and unknown, past and

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 74556 ***

v

PREFACE

The object of this book is to provide not only a practical list of suggestions that may be of service to those desirous of securing good and wholesome literature for their children, but also one that may be used by the children themselves.

This compilation is divided into nineteen groups, in which the books are graded according to ages, so that selection may be readily made, and each book title is followed by a short descriptive note.

It is impossible to draw any absolute line as to the particular age a boy or girl must be in order to read and assimilate the contents of a certain book, such is the difference in mental development. However, long experience has shown the compiler what is best adapted to the average, and the grading has been done accordingly.

Much care has been used in selecting books which have some value in assisting the gradual evolution of the mind or in shaping character, and which, at the same time, will make their appeal to the boy or girl.

vii

Contents