This superbly produced and fascinating book is unique. It is comprised of the short essays by the Reverend Richard Cobbold on his poorer parishioners at Wortham, north Suffolk, in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, alongside his watercolour paintings of them. In each case, we are given his writing on each character, usually about a page or two, plus Cobbold's colour illustration, and then this is followed by further information on the family or individual as gleaned by the Wortham Research Group from parish and other local records. There are over 130 colour illustrations of poor people in the book. The result is an enthralling work, as Cobbold's comments often include oral testimony, given as quotations from the parishioners, and the illustrations appear to have been good likenesses. In many cases, these were very poor people, often paupers. The result is a picture of each person, at home, at work, or in the village, showing their clothing, their surroundings, their houses, linked to Cobbold's usually sympathetic pen-sketch, narrating features or stories of their life, the nature of their livelihood, their use of local resources such as the common, their handicaps, merits or failings, as seen by him. The personalities are brought vividly to life, as Cobbold was a lively, empathetic and perceptive writer, and he clearly had considerable ability as an artist. Nothing like this exists in any other British rural social history.

Richard Cobbold was rector of Wortham between 1824 and 1877. He was the twentieth of twenty-two children by his father, John Cobbold of Ipswich, by John's second wife Elizabeth. He was also the author of The History of Margaret Catchpole, a Suffolk Girl (1845), well-known in its day, and of over twenty other works. The book being reviewed here, however, is based upon manuscript compilations which have never been published before, and is now put into print for the first time, with associated local research to accompany it.

The book has a foreword by Richard Mabey, and is very ably introduced by David Dymond, who has written an admirable and lengthy essay contextualising Richard Cobbold, and the village and local society in which he lived. Dymond covers issues such as Cobbold himself, the parish of Wortham, its social conditions, the poor law and poverty, religion, population, housing, landowning, farming, crime, and other such matters. Cobbold's writing is fascinating in part because it tells us so much about this clergyman and his attitudes. For example, he was strongly opposed to the new poor law, making many adverse judgements about the way his parishioners were treated by the relieving officer and guardians. There is much here to interest poor law historians. His pen-sketches also contain many quotations from the poor themselves, some slightly stylised by the clergyman, but, as David Dymond says, ‘the approach to biography adopted by Richard Cobbold was essentially a form of contemporary oral history’ (p. 9). Many of them had been born in the eighteenth century. Their words include reminiscences of Waterloo, the plundering of Napoleonic war camp followers, old inn signs, accounts of past employers and the uses of the common, showing their explicit efforts to avoid being forgotten. Cobbold was especially concerned with completed lives and their deaths. Throughout his writing and in his pictures, one feels the positive, sympathetic and supportive role of this clergyman. Cobbold was no censorious and unpopular John Skinner, and he emerges from this book with enormous credit as a moral example and participant-observer, as a leader and memorialiser of his village's poorer inhabitants.

The work could not have been achieved without the assistance and cooperative endeavours of the Wortham Research Group, and it is a tribute to them and their organisation. Much of the documentary information on each illustrated person comes from this valuable and well focused research. Anyone with ancestors in this parish will find this richly rewarding, and one can only envy them having such a superb resource. This book is one of the most exciting and revealing works that I have ever seen on British rural history. It is a real treasure, both as a lovely item to own, for it is beautifully produced, with its large format, and its very many attractive colour paintings, and as a really fascinating study of Richard Cobbold's parishioners and the village poor. Surely nothing has ever brought the rural poor so vividly to life as this. I cannot think of any other book to compare it with. It deserves to become a real classic. It is fantastically good value, and I would urge all academic libraries and any historian with interests in subjects like nineteenth-century rural society, the church, parish life, pauperism and the poor to buy it immediately.