“Mr Torr’s book is as typically English as a Christmas pudding.... His book is far more than a local history, however; it should be read as a complementary volume to Mansfield Park and Pendennis, to Life’s Little Ironies and The Way of all Flesh.... From Mr Torr we learn just how good life could be for a wealthy, self-contained, enterprising Englishman in the last hundred years or so. It was all more or less comic relief to him. Old walls are almost serious, and old roofs, and the beauty of fine days and fine landscape; the rest is good fun.”—Athenæum.
“He has travelled and written books, he is a depository of odd lore, sometimes local, sometimes classical, sometimes smacking of the great world. Intermixed with his own chatty reminiscences he gives us extracts from old family letters and other glimpses of days which the war has caused to seem further off than they are. Reading this charming little book is very much like listening to the squire gossiping by his own fireside.”—Guardian.
“And when we close his book and try to recollect what it was in it that made it so hard to lay down, we begin to be aware that his converse with us has flowed on in just that artless inevitable way: one thing, as the saying goes, leads to another.... He has charm; and the charm of this extraordinary book we despair of conveying by any quotation or any description; we can only say it is there.”—Field.
“He goes from story to story, from oddment to oddment, wasting no time in generalisations or connecting platitudes. The result is an extraordinary medley that might almost (save only for a few dates) have been written fifty years ago, or fifty years hence, by a man of Mr Torr’s knowledge, habits, and temperament, and that could have been read with as much pleasure by a man of George I’s reign as it probably will be by people who accidentally run across it in the reign of George XII.”—Land and Water.
“If by ‘small talk’ is meant gossip, Mr Torr will not be offended if we say that this is one of the pleasantest books of gossip which we ever came across.... The district is a little out of the world, and it is no wonder that some of the pleasant superstitions of rural England have not died out there.... The family were great travellers, and many parallel examples from other countries are adduced to illustrate the superstitions of Devonshire.”—Country Life.
“Mr Torr was well advised by his friends to publish these jottings, originally intended for private circulation. They will specially interest Devonians, as they are mostly about the manners and customs, superstitions and traditions of that fascinating county in the days before railways, but they give you glimpses also of later days and of places of more general interest, of Italy, for example, when under the intolerable tyranny of Austria, and of France when in the throes of the Franco-Prussian War, and even a glimpse of Napoleon the First.”—Truth.
“We are grateful that in days like these he has drawn from his store of reminiscences such a delightful and varied assortment of small talk. He brings to his aid, too, diaries and letters of relatives as keenly observant and as alert and shrewd as himself.”—Queen.
“My first thought was, ‘What on earth is the University Press doing with small talk in an obscure village?’ My second was, ‘How enterprising they were to get hold of such an odd and excellent book!’... I do not know any book in which so many characteristic and uniformly good stories of Devonshire people are to be found.... But he has gone far beyond the locality. He is liable to touch on anything in the world except his inner self. That is a pity. A little more egoism would have made his book even better.”—The New Statesman.
“‘I meant,’ writes the author of this attractive miscellany, ‘to keep to local matters, but it has gone much further than that.’ It has. Small Talk at Wreyland travels over half the world and many centuries of history.... The ordinary reader who merely wishes to roam the world without leaving his own fireside will find Mr Torr a delightful companion.”—Outlook.
“It is seldom that one comes on so good a volume of gossip as Small Talk at Wreyland.... Emma itself hardly throws more light on the comic side of human nature than do some of these old letters.... But it is for its glimpses of life in Wreyland, not of the larger world, that one will return again and again to Mr Torr’s most entertaining book.”—Everyman.