Drawn from Life

Famous for his illustrations for Winnie the Pooh and The Wind in the Willows, E H Shepard was a talented writer himself, as this second volume of his autobiography, the successor to Drawn from Memory, demonstrates. It spans the years from 1890 when he was ten to 1904, a crucial period of his life covering the early death of his mother, his education and his entrance into the Royal Academy, and culminating with his marriage. One of the pleasures of reading this book is the straightforward style with which Shepard recounts his memories. The uncertainty of being shunted from one residence to another, St John's Wood to Hammersmith to Blackheath, and the horror of being bullied and beaten at various schools by both teachers and older pupils, are expressed clearly with neither rancour nor self-pity. Other events, such as travelling to the West End to join in festivities to mark Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, and cross-channel trips with his father, brother and sister to Rouen and Hamburg, are told with a delightfully boyish sense of adventure and enjoyment. The book is enhanced immeasurably by more than a hundred of Shepard's illustrations, which match the charm of his prose. Drawn tightly and economically, the boat trips on rivers, horse-drawn trams, street parties, Sunday promenades, lugubrious headmasters and music-hall entertainers all combine to evoke a sense of innocence of a bygone age. Most people today look back on the Victorian era as being stuffy, repressive, riddled with social inequality and blighted by the self-righteousness of the ruling class, but Shepard manages to convey the positive outlook, completely free of cynicism, shared by so many of his contemporaries. Highly recommended. (Kirkus UK)