In the year of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, eighteen-year-old Reginald Grove left Uppingham School for Cambridge before training at Guy’s Hospital and then taking over his father’s medical practice in Huntingdonshire. As he later reflected ‘I was born in a country practice and destined from my earliest years for a medical career’.

The three-volume biography, based on his diaries and letters from 1881 to 1910, draws also on contemporary accounts of social life in a period of massive change in education, science, medicine, sport, railways, communication, agriculture and religion.

This first volume covers his upbringing in a Victorian market town; it paints a charming portrait of family life, his friends, hobbies, reading, holidays on his cousin’s farms, summer days fishing and boating and in the winter, skating on the Fens.