Before the bombardment [antikvár]

PREFACE The gentle reader is invited to approach this novel as if it were a historical romance, an alas ! imperfect but imaginative reconstruction of an epoch, the memory of which is almost obliterated, an inquest into the causes and conditions that preceded and perhaps were partly responsible for its effacement. The scene is laid, mainly, in an English seaside town during the opening years of the twentieth century; and the story is as much concerned with this town as with any of the characters that move through its streets. To understand how far that period with which we deal has retreated from us, it is only necessary to find a fashion-plate of twenty years ago and match it against a Cretan wall-painting in the Ashmolean museum. The distant, mysterious inhabitants of that lost world are infinitely nearer to us in their clothes, and probably in their outlook, than our own parents. And then seaside towns are always srlted up with the debris of the past century. The predominant note at Newborough, before the bombardment, was one of long settled comfort and confident respectability. The town faced the world with a Credo the grounds of which it refused even to examine. This belief in the inherent Tightness and essential righteousness of the prevailing system was, in reality, but a survival of that Swiss Family Robinson attitude toward life which the English had adopted at the outbreak of the nineteenth century and had maintained until its close; and this belief it is, which throws so inexplicable a charm over the whole period. Elsewhere, in the years down which our narrative