"Great Rivers of the World" by Esther Singleton is an edited anthology of travel and descriptive sketches written in the early 20th century. The volume gathers celebrated writers to portray major rivers through history, legend, landscape, and culture, privileging the picturesque and literary over the technical, and is accompanied by illustrations.The opening of Great Rivers of the World presents a preface in which Singleton explains the aim to collect evocative writing on famous streams, favoring antiquarian lore and scenic romance, followed by a wide-ranging contents list. Early chapters then unfold: Victor Hugo exalts the Rhine as Europe’s historic, many-faced river; A. Bowman Blake praises the Seine’s painterly light, rustic villages, and influence on French art; Sir William Hunter details the Ganges’ sanctity, pilgrimages, irrigation, and commerce; Pierre Loti paints a sensuous dawn ritual at Benares; Henry Gannett surveys the arid Colorado plateau and the sublimity of the Grand Canyon; John Wilson Croker meanders along Shakespeare’s Avon through Warwickshire sites like Kenilworth, Warwick, and Stratford; Charles Dickens recounts a steamboat descent of the St. Lawrence via the Thousand Islands to Montreal and Quebec; George Rawlinson outlines the Tigris’s sources, floods, and limited historical role; and Robert Louis Stevenson begins a lyrical canoeing passage on the swift, reed-fringed Oise. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
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