The Children's Pilgrimage

Two London orphans, Cecile and Maurice D'Albert, children of a French father and a Spanish mother, set out from London for the Pyrenees to find the grandmother they have never seen. L. T. Meade wrote for a Victorian public that liked its poverty rescued in the last chapter, and she gives them the rescue — after two hundred pages that are exact about hunger, cold and the price of a night's shelter. Cecile is ten, and the book knows what it is asking of her. Thirty-seven plates of London streets and hard roads by Luke Fildes and Thomas Creswick carry the children's journey out of the city and onto the open road.