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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Colin Clout's Calendar: The Record of a Summer, April-October," Grant Allen presents a vivid and observational narrative, encapsulating the essence of a summer spent in the English countryside. Through evocative prose and a keen eye for detail, Allen captures the subtleties of nature, the changing seasons, and rural life in an intimate and engaging manner. The book, structured as a monthly diary, reflects the Victorian era's fascination with the natural world while offering a personal meditation on the passage of time and human interactions with the environment. Allen's literary style weaves together elements of both realism and impressionism, enabling the reader to immerse themselves in the sights and sounds of summer, making it a remarkable reflection of the period's literary context. Grant Allen, a prominent figure in the Victorian literary scene, was known for his diverse body of work, including essays, novels, and scientific writings. His background in science and passion for the natural world undoubtedly influenced his decision to write this diary-like account. Allen's nuanced understanding of ecology and naturalism, combined with his ability to observe and articulate the beauty of rural England, enriches this work, allowing him to merge personal experiences with broader environmental themes. "Colin Clout's Calendar" is highly recommended for readers interested in Victorian literature, nature writing, and the cultural context of 19th-century England. It invites a reflective reading experience, allowing one to savor each month's unique attributes while reaping the philosophical insights embedded within. This work is not merely a diary; it is a celebration of life through the lens of nature and time. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Colin Clout's Calendar: The Record of a Summer, April-October
Table of Contents
Introduction
Across the span of a single summer, a close, patient gaze turns the familiar countryside into an unfolding drama of change. Grant Allen’s Colin Clout’s Calendar: The Record of a Summer, April-October traces a season’s arc month by month, inviting readers to watch the year ripen from first leaf to final harvest light. Written by a Victorian essayist and naturalist, the book captures how time, weather, and life interweave in the open air. Without chasing plot or spectacle, it proposes a subtler adventure: learning to recognize the world’s quiet transitions, and to find meaning in the textures of ordinary days.
The book belongs to the tradition of nineteenth-century nature writing, blending observational essay, pastoral reminiscence, and popular natural history. Its setting is the rural landscape as experienced in Victorian Britain, with lanes, fields, hedgerows, and watersides composing the stage for a summer’s record. First appearing in the late nineteenth century, it reflects a period when readers were eager for clear, accessible accounts of natural phenomena and the rhythms of country life. The title’s invocation of “Colin Clout,” the shepherd-poet of pastoral lore, signals an intentional conversation with earlier English traditions, while the “Calendar” frames the work as a guided almanac of the months.
The premise is elegantly simple: follow the year’s warm half from April to October and note what changes—light, birdsong, blossoms, insects, fruits, and the human labors that accompany them. Instead of grand narrative turns, the book offers a sequence of seasonal scenes and reflections that accumulate into a portrait of summer’s character. Readers can expect an essayistic voice that is companionable rather than didactic, curious without pedantry. The mood is attentive, reflective, and quietly celebratory, often pausing over overlooked details that reward a second look. It is a book to read at an unhurried pace, letting each month’s textures settle into view.
Allen’s style is lucid and inviting, shaped by his broader work as a science popularizer and observer of the natural world. He writes with the care of someone trained to notice patterns, yet he keeps technicality at bay, preferring images and analogies that welcome non-specialists. The prose balances description with gentle inference—suggesting how forms, colors, and behaviors fit into the wider workings of a living landscape. While the pastoral frame lends warmth and tradition, the book’s outlook is distinctly modern for its time, attuned to processes and change. The result is a voice at once lyrical and empirical, hospitable to both feeling and thought.
Several themes recur as the calendar advances. Time is foremost—not as a clock, but as a cycle that both repeats and surprises, asking readers to compare memory with present perception. Attention is another: the discipline of looking and listening until subtleties emerge. The book also probes the meeting point of culture and environment, noticing how human habits and rural work move in step with seasonal needs. Beneath these threads lies a quiet meditation on transience and renewal, on what is gained and relinquished as warmth rises and recedes. The overall effect is to cultivate a sturdier sense of place grounded in patient encounter.
For contemporary readers, its relevance lies in how it models ways of seeing. In an age of distraction, the calendar’s month-by-month frame restores scale and sequence, encouraging readers to measure time against living change rather than mere dates. It also offers a humane example of popular science writing—curious, accessible, and alert to ordinary beauty—valuable for anyone seeking to reconnect knowledge with experience. Those interested in environmental awareness will find an early, readable instance of paying ethical attention to the near-at-hand: the local path, the garden edge, the familiar skyline. The book’s quiet purpose is not to instruct so much as to reawaken perception.
Approached as a companion for seven months, Colin Clout’s Calendar offers steady company: a voice that walks beside you, notices, and prompts you to notice more. Each chapter marks an inflection point in the season, encouraging readers to look for correspondences in their own surroundings. Rather than pressing an argument, it builds trust through clarity, modesty, and delight in detail. By summer’s end, what lingers is a renewed capacity to register the small transformations that make a place feel alive. In that sense, its calendar is less a schedule than a discipline—a way of meeting the world that remains timely.
Synopsis (Selection)
Colin Clout’s Calendar: The Record of a Summer, April-October presents a month-by-month account of the English countryside as observed by Grant Allen under the pastoral persona “Colin Clout.” Organized from April through October, the book records plants, animals, and rural scenes at the pace they appear across a single season. Each chapter blends close field observation with concise explanations drawn from natural history, offering readers a practical calendar of recurring phenomena. The focus remains on what can be seen and when, connecting weather, soil, and habitat to seasonal change. The result is a structured tour of summer, attentive to pattern, timing, and place.
April opens the calendar with the first marked stirrings of spring. Allen notes early blossoms and catkins, the greening of hedgerows, and the return or activity of birds and insects that signal the season’s turn. He relates plant appearance to local conditions—woodland versus pasture, chalk versus clay—and describes how light and temperature patterns prompt growth. Amphibians and pond life receive attention as waters warm, while migrant calls and nesting preparations set a recurring rhythm. The chapter establishes the book’s method: detailed, localized observation anchored to dates, with brief naturalist explanations that link visible signs to underlying cycles of emergence and renewal.
In May, the countryside reaches a fuller bloom. The text surveys the heavy flowering of hedgerows and woods, the display of orchard trees, and the carpeting of bluebells where conditions allow. Nesting behavior intensifies, and the role of insects in pollination is outlined through examples of bees, hoverflies, and moths visiting specific flowers. Allen relates form to function by showing how flower shapes and timings match their visitors. Farm and lane activity escalates alongside botanical growth, giving a broader view of how rural work tracks the calendar. The chapter emphasizes continuity and expansion: what began in April becomes more abundant, frequent, and varied.
June marks the height of green abundance. Meadows and pastures dominate, with attention to grasses, buttercups, and orchids, and to the subtleties that distinguish one field community from another. Insects proliferate: butterflies, dragonflies, and a wide range of beetles and bees feature as visible actors in daylit heat. Water margins and ponds reveal larval stages and metamorphoses now concluding, and Allen relates these life cycles to the month’s warmth and long days. The chapter also notes the practical progress of hay, showing how agricultural timing mirrors ecological readiness. Observation and explanation work together to tie species’ peak activity to the season’s midpoint.
July sustains high summer but introduces contrasts driven by heat and dryness. The narrative follows walks across commons, riverbanks, and downs, comparing plant communities that prefer light soils with those of damp valleys. Thistles, umbellifers, and tall meadow species draw attention to insects feeding overhead and at the flower head. Ants, butterflies, and grasshoppers provide examples of abundance at the scale of sound and movement. Where water persists, emergent plants and reed edges hold steady activity despite parched slopes nearby. The chapter shows how July consolidates June’s growth while beginning the gradual shift toward seeding, ripening, and the first signs of seasonal ebb.
August brings harvest and the visible ripening of the landscape. Grain fields, hedgerow fruits, and wayside plants display seeds and berries, while late-flowering species extend nectar into warm weeks. Birds and insects concentrate where food is most plentiful, and Allen points out patterns of gleaning, wasp activity, and butterfly peaks on thistles and knapweeds. Thunderstorms and dry spells alternate, and the text notes how such weather punctuates growth, lodging, and ripening. Agricultural tasks become prominent, linking the natural calendar to human labor at its busiest. August thus reads as a month of culmination: the countryside is fullest, and energy turns steadily toward reproduction and dispersal.
September introduces transition and dispersal. The book attends to migrant gatherings, quieting song, and cooler mornings that favor mists and dew. Seed mechanisms become prominent: wings, burrs, capsules, and berries are described in relation to wind, animals, and gravity. Fungi and fruiting bodies appear as moisture returns, adding to the variety of late-season forms. Late flowers persist on warm banks, while shaded places fall silent. Allen’s observations connect the visible thinning of blooms with an increase in movement—flocks assembling, insects less frequent but focused where resources remain. The chapter presents September as an organized winding down, structured around departure, storage, and the preparation for dormancy.
October closes the record with color change and final departures. Leaves yellow, redden, and fall in patterns tied to species and site, and hedgerows offer nuts and the last berries to birds completing their migration. Field work slows as the main harvest ends, and the countryside shifts to quieter tasks. The book notes how insects diminish, how amphibians seek winter quarters, and how seeds and overwintering forms persist in soil and bark. Allen uses the month to review the sequence from April, marking how each stage prepared the next. October’s scenes emphasize completion: the season’s visible energies are stored, dispersed, or withdrawn.
Across its seven months, Colin Clout’s Calendar presents a consistent method: date-led observation, habitat comparison, and brief naturalist explanation that relates what is seen to broader cycles. The key points include the timing of flowering and nesting, the peak of meadow and insect life, the harvesting and ripening of late summer, and the dispersal and departure of early autumn. The overall message is practical and descriptive: nature unfolds in a discernible order that can be read in fields, hedgerows, and ponds. By following the calendar, the book provides a compact guide to seasonal change, linking everyday scenes to the rhythms that structure them.
Historical Context
Set across the English countryside from April to October, the book inhabits the late Victorian landscape of hedgerows, chalk downs, water meadows, and village lanes in the Home Counties and southern shires. Its months trace phenological change as spring migrants arrive, hayfields ripen, and autumnal fruiting begins, mirroring agricultural rhythms of haymaking and harvest. The temporal frame is the 1870s–1880s, when rural England still bore the imprint of enclosure yet remained walkable by rail-borne day trippers. Weather, daylight, and soil types structure observation, while parish boundaries, rights of way, and estate walls reveal a socially ordered terrain in which nature and property interlock.
The Darwinian revolution provided the dominant intellectual frame. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1871), along with the celebrated Oxford debate of 30 June 1860 between T. H. Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, established natural selection and a historical view of life. Ernst Haeckel’s ecology coinage in 1866 further oriented thinking toward organisms in environments. Grant Allen, a committed evolutionist and popular science writer, interprets seasonal scenes through adaptation, pollination, mimicry, and struggle for existence. The book’s observations of flowers, insects, and birds implicitly adopt Darwinian explanation, translating cutting‑edge science into fieldwise, month‑by‑month exempla for general readers.
Institutional transformations in British science shaped both method and audience. The Natural History Museum at South Kensington opened in 1881, consolidating collections and public education; Kew Gardens under Joseph Dalton Hooker (Director 1865–1885) coordinated imperial botany and taxonomy; the British Association for the Advancement of Science (from 1831) and proliferating field clubs trained amateurs in observation and nomenclature. The Selborne Society, founded in 1885, promoted nature protection grounded in careful study. Colin Clout’s Calendar reflects this culture: it prizes close identification, seasonal recording, and ecological context, offering readers disciplined ways to see hedgerow species, soil preferences, and insect relations that the new museums, gardens, and societies were simultaneously teaching.
The Great Agricultural Depression (1873–1896) reconfigured the very fields the book traverses. Transatlantic steamships and American prairie grain drove British wheat prices from roughly 56 shillings per quarter in the early 1870s to about 27 shillings by the mid‑1890s, pushing estates from arable to pasture and thinning rural labor. The Revolt of the Field created the National Agricultural Labourers’ Union in 1872 under Joseph Arch; the Ballot Act 1872 and the 1884 Reform Act altered rural politics. The Calendar’s haymaking, harvest stubbles, and hedgerow husbandry thus record a countryside under economic strain, where fallow, meadows, and mixed farming patterns are historically contingent rather than timeless.
Railways and new leisure reshaped access to nature. By 1880 Britain possessed roughly 17,000 route miles of track, linking London to the Downs, Chilterns, and coastal marshes. The Bank Holidays Act 1871 fostered day excursions; W. H. Smith bookstalls and cheap fares equipped travelling naturalists. In parallel, preservation politics emerged: the Commons Preservation Society formed in 1865, the Epping Forest Act 1878 saved 5,600 acres of wood‑pasture, and the National Trust followed in 1895. The book’s walkable stages, vistas from cuttings, and attention to commons mirror a culture of rail‑enabled field observation coupled with nascent campaigns to keep green spaces open against enclosure and speculative development.
Imperial networks and acclimatization policies influenced the flora and comparisons available to observers. Kew orchestrated plant transfers, notably cinchona from the Andes to India in the 1860s to secure quinine; acclimatization societies in the 1860s experimented with moving species across continents. Estate landscapes imported rhododendron ponticum, while later introductions such as the grey squirrel began in parks like Woburn in 1876. Grant Allen’s own colonial experience teaching at Queen’s College, Spanish Town, Jamaica, in 1873–1876, and his Canadian birth in 1848, sharpened his biogeographical awareness. The Calendar’s notes on cultivated exotics and naturalized plants situate English lanes within global circuits of species, commerce, and empire.
Educational and print revolutions created the broad audience the book addresses. The Elementary Education Act 1870 and the 1880 compulsory act boosted literacy; the repeal of the paper duty in 1861, rotary presses, and railway distribution lowered costs. Journals such as Nature (founded 1869) and the Fortnightly Review popularized science, while circulating libraries and cheap editions widened reach. Grant Allen wrote widely in periodicals before collecting essays in volumes; the Calendar exemplifies this didactic yet conversational mode. Its precise dates, localities, and identifications meet an expanding class of literate readers trained to expect empirical explanation, grounding country walks in accessible, up‑to‑date natural knowledge.
As social and political critique, the book advances a secular, evidence‑based understanding that quietly undercuts clerical natural theology and inherited authority in rural life. By presenting hedgerows as historical artifacts of enclosure and estate management, it exposes how property regimes shape what is seen, accessed, and conserved. Its sympathy for commons, field paths, and ordinary observers challenges elite monopolies of land and knowledge; its Darwinian framing rejects static hierarchies in favor of contingency and adaptation. Against the backdrop of depression‑hit agriculture and urban encroachment, the Calendar’s patient attention to local ecologies urges public stewardship, fairer access to green spaces, and policies informed by science rather than privilege.
Colin Clout's Calendar: The Record of a Summer, April-October
COLIN CLOUT’S CALENDAR.
I.PRIMROSE TIME.
Yesterday, April showers chased one another across the meadows all day long, coming and going between interludes of fathomless blue sky and vivid sunshine, the fleecy clouds being driven like sheep before a collie by the brisk south-westerly breezes. To-day, the Fore Acre is smiling accordingly with lusher grass, and the bustling bees are busier among fresher and sweeter primroses. For the Fore Acre is not a level field, like most others on the farm: it slopes down in broken terraces from the barton to the banks of Venlake, as we call our little streamlet in the valley below; and it is the slope that makes it the best spot near the homestead for primroses to grow on. These pet fancies and predilections of the flowers, indeed, are not without full and satisfactory reasons of their own. The plant chooses its proper haunt with due regard to its special needs and functions. It seeks warmth and shelter in some cases; bracing moorland air in others; moisture and shade, or sun and open space, according to the peculiar tastes and habits it has inherited from its remotest ancestors. We lordly human beings are, perhaps, too apt to overlook the essential community of life and constitution between ourselves and the plants. We under-estimate their unconscious intelligence and their guileless cunning; we forget that in their insentient fashion they plot and plan and outwit one another with almost human semblance of intentional strategy. Yet those of us who live much in their society learn at last to recognise that there is a meaning and a purpose in everything they do—a use for every little unnoticed point of structure or habit in their divinely ordered economy. Even the very date of their flowering has a settled purpose of its own, and bears some definite reference to the insect that brings the pollen, or to the time needed for ripening and setting the seed. To watch the succession of these little members of the floral commonwealth, to learn the connection in which they stand to one another, and to interpret the purpose that they severally have in view—these are the great problems and the self-sufficing rewards of those who slowly spell out for themselves from living hieroglyphics the emblems of the country calendar.
See from the edge of the hillside here how the primroses cling, as it were on purpose, to the tumbled slopes and banks of the Fore Acre, leaving almost flowerless the level platforms of terrace between them. Each little bank or escarpment is a perfect natural flower-bed, thickly covered from top to bottom with beautiful masses of tufted yellow bloom. But in between, on the intermediate grassy bits, there are no primroses: or, to speak more correctly, all the primroses there are cowslips, their tall scapes not yet much more than just raised above the level of the greensward. For at bottom primroses and cowslips are really identical: even the old-fashioned botanists have freely allowed that much, and have reunited the two varieties as a single species under a common name. The leaves are absolutely indistinguishable, as you observe when you look closely at them; the structure of the individual flowers is the same in all important points: they only differ in the arrangement of the blossoms on the stem; and even in that the two forms are connected by every intermediate stage in the third dubious variety known as the oxlip. Why, then, do cowslips differ from primroses at all? For a very simple yet ingenious reason.
The true primrose almost always grows on a bank or slope, where its blossoms can readily be seen by the bees and other fertilising insects without the need for any tall common flower-stalk. Hence its stalk is undeveloped, as the scientific folk put it—in other words, it never produces one at all to speak of. Each separate primrose springs by a distinct stem from a very stumpy and dwarfish thick little stock, which represents the same organ as the long and graceful stalk of the cowslip. This stock is so short that it is quite hidden by the close rosette of downy wrinkled leaves; but if you examine it carefully you will see that the flowers are arranged upon it in an umbel or circular group, exactly like that of its taller and slenderer nodding relative. Each primrose blossom is also larger, so as more easily to secure the attention of the passing bee. In the cowslip, on the other hand, growing as it usually does on level ground, the common stalk has acquired a habit of lengthening out prodigiously, so as to raise its clustered bunch of flowers well above the ground and the surrounding grasses, and thus catch the eye of some roaming insect, who could never have perceived its buried blossoms if they were laid as close to the grass-clad earth as in the case of the neighbour primroses. The two varieties have now become practically almost distinct, because each naturally sticks to its own best-adapted haunts, and is usually crossed only by pollen of its own kind. But the oxlip is a sort of undecided tertium quid, an undifferentiated relic of the old undivided ancestral form, which grows in intermediate situations, and crosses now with one plant and now with the other, so preventing either from finally taking its stand as a truly separate species.
The reason why the thorough-going primroses do not cross with the thorough-going cowslips is easy enough to understand: they are seldom both in blossom together. This, again, naturally results from the form and habit of the two flowers. In both, the head of bloom is produced from material laid by during the past year in the perennial rootstock; and in both, the buds begin to sprout as soon as the weather grows warm enough for them to venture forth with safety. But the ‘rathe primrose’ bursts into blossom first, because it has only to produce short subsidiary stalks for each separate flower; the cowslip lingers somewhat later, because it has to send up a stout common stem, besides forming the minor pedicels for the individual cups. Their other differences are all of similar small kinds. The primrose, standing straight up from the earth, receives the fertilising bee or butterfly on the face of its wide open corolla; the cowslip, a little pendulous by nature, receives its guest from below, or from one side, and so has its blossom more bell-shaped as well as less widely expanded. The primrose is pale to suit its own special insect visitors; the cowslip is a deeper yellow, melting almost into orange, to meet the tastes of a somewhat different and perhaps more daintily æsthetic circle. At bottom, however, both flowers are very nearly the same, and their peculiarities are all specially intended to insure a very high type of cross-fertilisation.
Observe that in both flowers the corolla, though deeply divided into five notched lobes or sections, is yet not really composed of separate petals, but tapers beneath into a very long and narrow tube. Cowslips and primroses belong by origin to the great division of five-petalled flowers; for all blossoms originally had their parts arranged either in sets of threes or in sets of fives; and this distinction, though often obscured, is still the most fundamental one between all flowering species. But in the primrose, as in many other advanced types, the five primitive petals have coalesced at their bases into a single tube, so as to make the honey accessible only to bees, butterflies, and other insects with a long proboscis, who could benefit the plant by duly effecting the transfer of pollen from the stamens of one flower to the sensitive surface of another. In blossoms with open petals many thieving little creatures come in sideways and steal the honey without going near the pollen at all: in a better adapted flower like the primrose such a mischance is rendered impossible.
Notice, too, that in both varieties the eye or centre of the corolla is deep orange, while the outside is lighter in tone. This difference in colour acts as a honey-guide, and directs the bee straight to the mouth of the tube at whose base the nectar is stored. And now again, let us cut open one or two flowers of each variety, so as to lay bare the interior of the tube. See, they have each two separate and corresponding forms, known long ago to village children as the thrum-eyed and the pin-eyed primroses or cowslips. In the pin-eyed form the long head of the pistil, looking for all the world like an old-fashioned round-headed pin, reaches just to the top of the tube, and forms the prominent object in the centre, while the five stamens are fastened to the side of the tube about half-way down. In the thrum-eyed form, on the contrary, the stamens make a little ring at the top of the tube, while the pin-headed summit of the pistil only reaches just half-way up the tube, exactly opposite the same spot where the stamens are fixed in the other sort. When the bee begins by visiting a thrum-eyed blossom, she collects a quantity of pollen on the hairs at the top of her proboscis. If she then visits a second flower of the same type, she does not fertilise its pistil, but only gathers a little more pollen. As soon, however, as she reaches a pin-eyed blossom she unconsciously deposits some of this store of pollen on the sensitive surface or pin of its pistil; while at the same time some more pollen, half-way down the tube, clings to her proboscis, and is similarly rubbed off against the pistil of the next thrum-eyed blossom she chances to visit. The exact correspondence in position of the various parts in the two diverse forms admirably insures their due impregnation. Thus each blossom is not only fertilised from another flower, but even from a flower of an alternative type, which is a peculiarly high modification of the ordinary method.
II.THE RETURN OF THE SWALLOWS.
Last week’s showers, much longed for and anxiously expected after the apparently endless spell of bitter east winds, have brought out the meadows at last into the full fresh green of early spring. The buds upon the horse-chestnuts, which stood idle and half-open for so many days, have now finally burst forth into delicate sprays of five-fingered foliage; and the young larches among the hillside hangers are revelling in the exquisite and tender freshness of verdure which larches alone can exhibit, and even they only for two short weeks of April weather. As for the hedgerows, I really think I can never recollect anything to equal them. The innumerable pecks of March dust from which we have been suffering seem to have brought forth gold enough in the celandines and crowfoots for many royal ransoms; and the masses of primroses on the sunny banks are both thicker in tufts of bloom and with larger individual blossoms than I ever before remember to have seen them. The copses on Wootton Hill are carpeted with daffodils, wood-anemones, and hyacinths, in great patches of yellow, blue, and white; and it is no wonder that to-day I should have seen the swallows, enticed back from their winter quarters in Algeria by the sun and the flowers, flying low above the gorse and the violet-beds in the undercliff, where they may now catch hundreds of small insects on the wing around the honey-bearing blossoms which attract them out of their cocoons upon these warmer and brighter mornings.
