This is the first of a three volume biography of Reginald Grove, an English country doctor, based on his diaries and letters from 1881 to 1910. It draws on contemporary accounts of social life in a period of massive change in education, science, medicine, sport, railways, communication, agriculture and religion.
This first volume covers his upbring in St Ives, Huntingdon, a Victorian market town and paints a charming portrait of family life, his friends, hobbies, reading, holidays on his cousin’s farms, summer days fishing and boating and in the winter skating on the Fens.

The author, Peter Flower, is an historian with an interest in Victorian and Edwardian England.