ABSTRACT
It is the aim, the avowed duty, of each member of the Crabtree Foundation to bring his own discipline to the recovery of the Life and Works of Joseph Crabtree. It is of course recognised in some quarters that the creative imagination is as important a tool in criticism as it is in literature. It relieves the critic of the painful labour of producing facts, and yet it certainly permits the formation of splendid judgements. Whilst it would be false to the aims of the Foundation to admit the propriety of this view at least beyond the narrow limits of judicious illumination and inspiration, my own study must eschew it altogether. I confine myself to a brief and factual inquiry, topographical in its methods and documented from the best sources. I am encouraged to pursue this by the interest that my predecessors have from time to time aroused in the whereabouts of Joseph Crabtree and Joseph Crabtree’s writings. I propose to make a deviation northwards from the now well-established Sodbury-Orleans line to Yorkshire, whence came the great and numerous line of Crabtree. I shall note some of the early circumstances which coloured Crabtree’s mind, provided some of his earlier but essential experiences and perhaps conditioned his moral attitude.
