Autobiography

INTRODUCTION

Perhaps of all the books that Hudson wrote, this has the most of his own personality. He must have written it, in the same spirit as when he wrote The London Sparrow, wistfully, from the drear environment of bricks an mortar, and of streets damp with petrol, with an eye on the bright birds that he had known so long ago and far away.

The title has a beauty of its own, but he was always happy in his titles. … He was himself a bird in London, caged in ill-health and poverty, for the most part unable to escape, but at rare intervals, into his own world of light and air.

As cruel fools put out birds eyes to make them as they say, and perhaps think, to sing more sweetly, so had a cruel world imprisoned Hudson in his London cage. Luckily, in spite of its neglect of a genius so  rare, it could not stop his singing. Many have written of his great simplicity, nearness to nature, and of his style, that seems to have as little effort in it as have the trills and quavers of a nightingale. ….