This attractive and intriguing book sets out to survey the remarkable history of “ornamental” garden hermits, from their earliest days as spiritual, and not so spiritual, recluses, through their popular heyday as features of the melancholy gardens of eccentric English landowners, down to their less than dignified modern incarnation as cheap plastic ornaments that can be purchased from any garden center.

This is an authoritative book packed with fascinating detail, a veritable “cabinet of curiosities,” but I have to say, with considerable regret, that I was disappointed by it; this was probably more my own fault than the author's, because I foolishly believed the marketing hyperbole of the publishers, and my resulting high expectations were not matched by what I found. The publishers tell us that this is an exploration of the eighteenth-century craze for ornamental hermits. It isn't. What it provides is an extended survey or gazetteer to allow us, the readers, to make that exploration for ourselves and to draw our own conclusions.

Further, the publishers' press release tells us that this book is “lavishly” illustrated. It isn't. It has fifty-four illustrations within its 257 text pages, twelve of which are in color and archaically grouped together. Most of the monochrome illustrations are small and of poorer quality than they need be; an odd addition to the extensive bibliography is a list of a dozen or so images not reproduced in the book, some of which are said to be “available on-line” (but without the appropriate URLs), so maybe there once were more illustrations, which have been excised to reduce costs.

If we ignore those aspects over which the author had little or no control, there are still some real concerns. The first of these relates to the book's intended readership. In his use of the jokey subtitle and his total rejection of footnotes, Professor Campbell explicitly declares this book to be suitable for the general reader. It isn't. This is decidedly a book for the specialist who will already be familiar with several of the topics covered.

Another concern springs from the fact that Campbell poses a number of interesting questions about hermits in his preface: “Who were these people? Why did landowners think it appropriate to have them in their gardens? What function did they serve? Why did some landowners style themselves hermits? Why did others build hermitages with imagined hermits who had perpetually stepped out for a moment? Where are these hermitages, and what do they look like?” It is deeply disappointing that only the last pair of these questions is fully, even excessively, answered.

This is not an easy book, and Campbell allows few concessions to the casual reader. We must be prepared, from the outset, to work quite hard, and to travel with the author on an extended journey, both historically and geographically, visiting such diverse figures as the emperor Hadrian, Gilbert White of Selborne, and George Harrison of the Beatles, and places as far apart as Kushkova in Russia and Innisfallen Island, County Kerry; he also includes every sort of hermitage, from the truly isolated natural cave to Catherine the Great's palace in St. Petersburg, both of which stretch the book's brief to breaking point, and between which exists an infinity of variations, which would be hard to cover in a lifetime, let alone in a single book. The author, then, strays far and wide beyond his core story of eccentricity in Georgian England, spending significant time not only with medieval and renaissance rulers and noblemen who just wanted a bit of blessed solitude but also with religious solitaries and anchorites, even after acknowledging in the preface that ornamental hermits had nothing to do with their spiritual predecessors.

I am sincerely puzzled as to why the author did not stick to the Georgian period, during which ornamental hermits saw their rise and their fall, and when they became fashionable as “incidents in designed landscapes,” as Kate Wilson perceptively puts it in her admirably succinct and pithy Hermitages of 2011 (from English Heritage's Introduction to Heritage Assets series). Ornamental hermitages, ridiculed by the Hon. John Byng as “the business of vanity and folly” after his visit to the Rev. Wolley Jolland's well-documented example in Louth, Lincolnshire, in 1791, had more in common with Henry Chaplin's famous 1867 Derby winner, Hermit, than they ever did with all the pious spiritual recluses of the Middle Ages. Garden hermitages, with or without occupants, are inescapably and solely elements of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century garden design, intended to show off the wealth, education, and fashionable taste of their owners, just as Hermit did.

Campbell's stretching of his subject back to Imperial Rome and forward to the garden gnome strikes me as unnecessary and confusing. There is more than enough evidence of English ornamental hermits and hermitages within the Georgian period to fill this book without having to artificially broaden its scope to fit a capricious subtitle.

This is a book I opened with high hopes of a thoroughly entertaining read full of fascinating and surprising revelations. Apparently alone among reviewers, I finally closed it feeling short-changed and let down. This is a hugely attractive and appealing subject, full of human interest and offering the potential for a close analysis of a neglected field of garden design and decorative architecture; so let us hope that Professor Campbell's solid groundwork will lead to a second volume, or else inspire other scholars to pick up where he has left off. The melancholy gardens of William Shenstone, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Tyers, and others, with their Temples of Death, their tumbling ruins, their gloomy and moralizing inscriptions, and their inevitable hermitages, badly need a twenty-first-century champion, preferably before even more of Professor Campbell's catalog of hermitages at the end of his book have to be recorded as “destroyed.”