Normandy Picturesque

LONDON: SAMPSON LOW, SON, & MARSTON, CROWN BUILDINGS, FLEET STREET. 1870.
London: Printed by William Clowes and Sons, Stamford Street & Charing Cross.
In issuing the Travelling Edition of Normandy Picturesque, the publishers deem it right to state that the body of the work is identical with the Christmas Edition; but that the Appendix contains additional information for the use of travellers, some of which is not to be found in any Guide, or Handbook, to France.
The descriptions of places and buildings in Normandy call for little or no alteration in the present edition, excepting in the case of one town, concerning which the Author makes the following note:—
The traveller who may arrive at Pont Audemer this year, with ' Normandy Picturesque ' in his hand, will find matters strangely altered since these notes were written; he will find that a railway has been driven into the middle of the town, that many old houses have disappeared, that the inhabitants have left off their white caps, and have given up their hearts to modern ways.
Such changes have come rapidly upon Pont Audemer, but we must not, in consequence, alter our description of it; for the old houses and the old customs are dear memories, and the more worth recording because the reality has faded before our eyes.
London, May , 1870.
Transcriber's Note: It is regretted that the illustrations in this book did not reproduce as well as hoped.

It is, perhaps, rather a subject for reproach to English people that the swallows and butterflies of our social system are too apt to forsake their native woods and glens in the summer months, and to fly to 'the Continent' for recreation and change of scene; whilst poets tell us, with eloquent truth, that there is a music in the branches of England's trees, and a soft beauty in her landscape more soothing and gracious in their influence than 'aught in the world beside.'
Whether it be wise or prudent, or even pleasant, to leave our island in the very height of its season, so to speak—at a time when it is most lovely, when the sweet fresh green of the meadows is changing to bloom of harvest and gold of autumn—for countries the features of which are harder, and the landscape, if bolder, certainly less beautiful, for a climate which, if more sunny, is certainly more bare and burnt up, and for skies which, if more blue, lack much of the poetry of cloud-land—we will not stay to enquire; but admitting the fact that, for various reasons, English people will go abroad in the autumn, and that there is a fashion, we might almost say a passion, for 'flying, flying south,' which seems irresistible—we will endeavour in the following pages to suggest a compromise, in the shape of a tour which shall include the undoubted delight and charm of foreign travel, with scenery more like England than any other in Europe, which shall be within an easy distance from our shores, and within the limits of a short purse; and which should have one special attraction for us, viz., that the country to be seen and the people to be visited bear about them a certain English charm—the men a manliness, and the women a beauty with which we may be proud to claim kindred.