Allen Leeper's Letters Home, 1908-1912: An Irish-Australian at Edwardian Oxford: Volume 67 (Camden Fifth Series) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1009493639 ISBN 13: 9781009493635

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2024

Synopsis

Allen Leeper, Oxford undergraduate and future Foreign Office mandarin, wrote regularly to his family in Australia from 1908 until he left university in 1912. His letters, in Balliol archives and the State Library of Victoria, record his experiences at Balliol College, among a 'golden generation' decimated by the First World War, and on his extensive travels in Europe. They give a vivid picture of a continent on the eve of war, written by someone whose background afforded a degree of objectivity. Superficially, Oxford was still 'the apotheosis of the amateur', but Leeper's middle-class friends shared a progressive and socially responsible outlook. While he enjoyed college balls and tennis parties, his letters testify to a world shaken by political crisis and social change, and provide glimpses of emerging modernity, bringing out the complexities of a critical period in British and European history.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1009493639
• ISBN 13: 9781009493635
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 490
• Editor: Hayton David William