Leonard Merrick and Alfred the Great

AN INTERESTING CHOICE for re‐issue this autumn in Anthony Blond's Doughty Library of novels by Victorian and Edwardian authors is Leonard Merrick's The Position of Peggy Harper: interesting because Peggy Harper has always been deservedly a favourite of Leonard Merrick's admirers, and these have been many and various; interesting because this novel is highly typical of Merrick's fiction in the realistic vein; and interesting, too, because any revival of enthusiasm for Merrick, a writer who has never quite had his due, should remind us of the great debt that Leonard Merrick owed to another man who, when he died in 1942, had been for a year borough librarian at Stratford on Avon, and whose name might be remembered today in several connexions more often than it is. The librarian was Alfred Wareing and it was he who was responsible for the publication between 1918 and 1921 of a uniform edition of Merrick's works.