Augustus John Cuthbert Hare (1834-1903) was a Victorian writer who had clung, so to speak, to the edges of fame. He was born into the maddest of upper-class English families and survived one of the cruelest of childhoods to write monumental travel guides to the Continent and a six-volume autobiography, The Story of My Life. That autobiography is now extremely rare and growing rarer - since every day copies of it, even in libraries, crumble into dust.

This is a one-volume condensation of this remarkable work, containing what the editors consider to be the highlights of Augustus Hare's harrowing tale, beginning with his birth, shortly following which his lackadaisical parents gave him to a relative, assuring her that if she wanted more children she should let them know, because they had others.