A Tramp’s Notebook

Morley Roberts spent his young manhood working his passage around the world, and this 1904 collection of thirty-one essays is what he made of the notes. The pieces move without ceremony from a watch-night service in San Francisco to sheep herding on the Texan plateau, trout streams in British Columbia, the road to Terracina, a climb on the Matterhorn, and a talk with Kruger. One chapter recounts his visit to Robert Louis Stevenson at Apia. Others take up railroad wars, American shipmasters, sailors’ homes, and the tramps he had once lived among. Roberts is remembered now mainly as George Gissing’s friend and biographer, but his own eye was sharp and unsentimental. He wrote about labour from the inside, having done it, and the book keeps the plain directness of a man setting down what he saw.