The Astonishing History Of Troy Town

Dodo Collections brings you another classic from Arthur Quiller-Couch ‘The Astonishing History of Troy Town.’The Astonishing History of Troy Town - published in 1888 when he was just twenty-four - has a liveliness and enthusiasm about it which is still infectious today. Troy Town is the thinly disguised Cornish port of Fowey, where Quiller-Couch spent most of his life. His novel pillories the town’s genteel, English, middle-class society, whilst celebrating the down-to-earth wit and wisdom of the local Cornish.Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch was a Cornish writer, who published under the pen name of Q. He published his Dead Man’s Rock (a romance in the vein of Stevenson’s Treasure Island) in 1887, and he followed this up with Troy Town (1888) and The Splendid Spur (1889). After some journalistic experience in London, mainly as a contributor to the Speaker, in 1891 he settled at Fowey in Cornwall. He published in 1896 a series of critical articles, Adventures in Criticism, and in 1898 he completed Robert Louis Stevenson’s unfinished novel, St Ives. With the exception of the parodies entitled Green Bays: Verses and Parodies (1893), his poetical work is contained in Poems and Ballads (1896). In 1895 he published an anthology from the sixteenth and seventeenth-century English lyrists, The Golden Pomp, followed in 1900 by an equally successful Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900 (1900). He was made a Bard of Gorseth Kernow in 1928, taking the Bardic name Marghak Cough (’Red Knight’).Quiller-Couch was a noted literary critic, publishing editions of some of Shakespeare’s plays (in the New Shakespeare, published by Cambridge University Press, with Dover Wilson) and several critical works, including Studies in Literature (1918) and On the Art of Reading (1920). He edited a successor to his verse anthology: Oxford Book of English Prose, which was published in 1923. He left his autobiography, Memories and Opinions, unfinished; it was nevertheless published in 1945.