On Foot in Sussex by AA Evans

Methuen, 1933

Why?

A second hand bookshop find which ticked two boxes for me. I'm fascinated by interwar nostalgia in the face of an increasingly unrecognisable world, and I myself have walked a large proportion of the footpaths of Sussex over the years.

Enjoyment factor

A vanished world, but also a vanished species of author. AA Evans was the Vicar of East Dean and Friston (two idyllic flint-stone villages on the South Downs) from 1908 to 1929.

This book is a collection of his columns for various local magazines and newspapers, consisting mostly of observations about the natural world and church architecture, but also touching on the state of village life in the 1930s, with its fair share of authorial yearning for times gone by.

AA Evans is of a then dying breed of amateur-historian clergyman, common from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, and important contributors to our knowledge of local history (another example being our previous friend Francis T Vine).

The book is cute and a fast read, but not entirely fascinating. Aside from the bit where the author gets frustrated because no pub will open up and serve him a cup of tea when he underestimates the length of his walk, the best bits are his comments on the changing times - bearing in mind that he was essentially an Edwardian in an unfathomable modern world.

It left me thinking ...

That whatever one might say today, publishing houses have certainly become more exacting and more egalitarian in the last hundred years.

For a major publishing house such as Methuen to publish such an obscurity says a lot about the times: AA Evans was probably friends with the editor, and the pool of book-buyers wouldn't have been much broader than the small world of authors and publishers.

In a world of near-universal literacy and access on demand to both books and other content in so many formats, it's worth taking a moment to celebrate how far we've come. Today, AA Evans wouldn't have got through a publisher's editorial meeting - but his work would have made for a great Substack with an engaged, local audience.