pForrest Reid (1875-1947), the Ulster novelist, spent his life in Belfast, in the north of Ireland, save for a period as an undergraduate at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he received a B.A. in 1908. He numbered among his many friends and acquaintances George William Russell (A. E.), E. M. Forster, Edmund Gosse, C. S. Lewis, and Walter de le Mare, as well as various Uranians such as Theo Bartholomew, Osbert Burdett, and Mark André Raffalovich.
pDespite his sixteen novels, his two autobiographies, and a range of other works, despite being a founding member of the Irish Academy of Letters and an honorary Doctor of Letters of Queen's University in Belfast, despite his novel iYoung Tom/i being awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Forrest Reid closely borders both oblivion and canonicity. However, this author, who has been aptly dubbed the "Arch-Priest of a Minor Cult," deserves reconsideration and perhaps a place in the pantheon of English letters.
piThe Tom Barber Trilogy/i - composed of the very distinct novels iUncle Stephen/i (1931), iThe Retreat; or, The Machinations of Henry/i (1936), and iYoung Tom; or, Very Mixed Company/i (1944) - is Forrest Reid's magnum opus. The present scholarly edition presents those three novels as clean texts (in Volume I), followed by a study of Forrest Reid and explanatory notes for the trilogy (in Volume II).
