NO. 1. AN OLD RIVER-WALL OR EMBANKMENT (CHELSEA) See page 9
STORIES OF
LONDON
BY
E. L. HOSKYN, B.A. (LOND.)
AUTHOR OF "PICTURES OF BRITISH HISTORY," ETC.
WITH A PREFACE BY
SOPHIE BRYANT, D.Sc., LITT.D.
LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1914
PREFACE
There are many kinds of ignorance which, for lack of time andopportunity, we may rightly tolerate in ourselves. Ignorance of thestories that cling around and beautify the home-place is not one ofthese. A place, indeed, is not a home unless human life has woven athread of story through and through it. Happy are those who dwell aschildren in a place well clad with racy memories and legendary lore.The city-home of the London child is just such a place. Here we have acity with an old old history losing itself in the mists of time, andpreserving itself in the memorials of its ancient sites and the talesthat grow like ivy round its odd place-names. Of all this the carelesscity-dweller takes no note, but the London child should be a differentkind of being. London stories are racy of London; they reflect itslife in every age; and the London child is heir to them all.
The stories of London in this little book are interesting to everybody,whether young or old; they cannot fail to be so, because London isinteresting, more or less, to everybody in the world. But the book iswritten more particularly for the children of London, so that they maynot be careless city-dwellers, as so many are, but may grow up intoreal citizens of this great London, loving their old city in all itsnooks and corners for its own dear sake, feeling it in all the twistsand turns of its varied history, as if their life and its life werebound up in one.
But this is not all that the study of London's stories may{4}do forthe London child. The natural beginning of interest inhistory—including the literature that collects around it—arises outof interest in the story of the place in which we live. We walk aboutthe place and picture the events of which we read as happening withinit. The place is transfigured, is filled w