Recollections With Photogravure Portraits

David Christie Murray's memoir opens with a child's-eye vision of the Black Country in 1847, where furnaces, canals, and foundries press against hedgerows, fields, and country lanes. From that divided landscape comes his first revelation of beauty: the curl of a common bracken frond, an image so powerful it becomes the emotional center of his life. He recalls how true seeing differs from ordinary sight, how borrowed glasses revealed stars and distant mountains, and how beauty is felt as much as observed. Family memory deepens the portrait, from a book-loving printer father and his unsold stock of serious literature to a romantic legend of descent from the Dukedom of Atholl. Childhood unfolds through peril and wonder: first steps, learned fear fed by superstitious servants, the terrifying "Dudley Devil," and a limping stranger later revealed as a maimed but dignified metal-worker, inspiring pity where terror once ruled. Murray also delights in the rough local heroes of boyhood, then follows his own passage into work at his father's printing office. The memoir later shifts to wartime Turkey, where bullets, brutal discipline, and a chaotic military hospital expose the violence, absurdity, and human cost of conflict. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.