London: Enitharmon Press (1983) First Edition. Hardcover. Book Condition: Fine Book Jacket Condition: Near Fine with very light signs of shelf wear. Not price-clipped. 97 pp with 11 b/w illustrations. Includes memoir of the poet by Berridge as well.

From the front flap:

Edward Thomas and Jesse Berridge first met in London in 1901; Thomas had just left Oxford and Berridge was working in a City bank. Their friendship lasted until Thomas was killed in France in 1917; by then he was known in the literary world as a leading critic, essayist and biographer, but only to close friends as a poet. Berridge, who was ordained in 1906, had then just become rector of Little Baddow; in the remaining fifty years of his life he became a distinguished Essex archaeologist, author of five historical novels, and a canon of Chelmsford.

This is the first collection of Edward Thomas's letters to any of his many friends to be published complete and without omissions. It brings us closer to him than ever before. None of Jesse Berridge's letters to Thomas survives, but in old age he wrote down his 'stray memories of what I can recall across the years of the momentous experience of his friendship' and this moving memoir is now also published for the first time.

In his Introduction and Epilogue Anthony Berridge gives an account of the lives of both men; he also relates how Helen Thomas and her children kept in touch with Jesse Berridge and with such other old friends as Eleanor Farjeon, Robert Frost and Duncan Williams, for many years after Edward Thomas's death.

The book is illustrated with photographs of Thomas and Berridge (including some unpublished) and of the houses where they lived.