A young gentleman with an inheritance waiting sets out on the road to learn life, and is comprehensively robbed, beaten, educated and befriended by tinkers, prizefighters and a highwayman's daughter. Farnol painted scenery in New York theatres and wrote his first novel on scraps between shifts; the Regency road here is his invention and his trademark, and Peregrine is the most likeable of his fools. Fifty-nine plates of country roads, cottage doors and ale-house gatherings, from George Morland to Edvard Munch, follow the same rural England Peregrine rides through.
