Narrow Boat
Re-issued by The History Press in January 2010.New edition published by The History Press in 2000.
Originally published by Eyre & Spottiswoode in 1944.
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This famous book may be said to have started the revival of interest in the English waterways. It led to the formation of the Inland Waterways Association (see the IWA website), and hence to the modern canal movement. Certainly it can claim to have made most people familiar with the term ‘narrow boat’.
As a story, the book is extraordinarily interesting and informative. It is, however, more than that. As Sir Compton Mackenzie wrote "it is an elegy of classic restraint unmarred by any trace of sentiment" for a way of life and a landscape which have receded more and more into the past in the years since the book first appeared in 1944. Rolt's pen, continued Mackenzie, "is as sure as the brush of a Cotman. Narrow Boat will go on the shelf with White and Cobbett and Hudson."
"He brings a profound historic, topographical and general interest not only in the canals themselves but in the vestiges of the rural culture directly or indirectly connected with them beside their banks. He is thus offering the reader something unique in the rich modern literature of our native countryside ... To regard Mr Rolt’s book as nostalgic is, therefore, wholly to misinterpret it. He is pleading for something that is part of the soul of England."
H J Massingham in his foreword to the 1944 edition
"An engineer by profession, a humanist and almost a poet by temperament, Mr LTC Rolt has long loved the English canals...The book mingles description and anecdote with much fascinating lore about canal life and tradition."
The Manchester Guardian
