Landscape with Figures

L.T.C. Rolt's fame rests on the fact that he was unique in producing works of literature from subject matter which had not before his time, been considered the stuff of literature - engineering, canals, railways, steam engines, agricultural machinery, vintage cars - as demonstrated in his classic biographies of Brunel, Telford, the Stephensons and Trevithick. His ambition was to give the history of the Industrial Revolution an imaginative and literary shape; and this he admirably succeeded in doing in his biographies and in his superbly written volumes of autobiography.
Landscape with Figures is the third volume of this autobiography. The first, Landscape with Machines, focused on his younger days, from childhood to trainee engineer, and his ambition to explore the inland waterways of England in his converted narrowboat, Cressy. In the second volume, Landscape with Canals, Rolt described his meanderings through those waterlanes of England and Wales, combining, to some extent, his love for the English countryside with his life-long fascination with machines. In this book, written during the last years of his life, Rolt has taken up his pen once more to continue his intriguing and often diverse life-story. He gives an account of the early days of the Talyllyn Railway Company and Preservation Society, describes his involvement in vintage and veteran car rallies, and vividly recreates his travels on the Tralee-Dingle Light Railway in remote West Kerry. Intermingled with these are his struggles to become a writer of repute.
This final volume, published posthumously, completes the trilogy and is a fitting tribute to the man who, through his appreciation of the 'aesthetics of technology', could be said to have given a literary shape to the Industrial Revolution.