Page:The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 1.djvu/105



[1893-94]

In these days of cheap publication authors are constantly multiplying and have naturally lost a great deal of the respect they used to command before. Let me then at once inform the reader that, in issuing this little guide I am not aspiring to authorship, but simply supplying, as I believe, a long-felt want. Issuing guides does not make authors. They are made of `sterner stuff'. It will be readily admitted that, though Indians have been going to and returning from England for the last twenty years and more, no attempt has yet been made at writing a guide like this. Some of them have published books describing with much effect what is to be seen The exact date of writing is not available. Pyarelal says: "comparative leisure at Pretoria enabled Gandhiji to resume two little unfinished ventures which he had launched while he was in India. One was a little handbook or Guide to London that he had set about to prepare in answer to numerous inquiries on his return from London... It bears the evidence of having been written, at least in part, between the second half of 1893 and the first half 1894... He never published it." (The Early Phase, p. 316). In the introduction, Gandhiji writes: "And here the only topic of conversation with my visitors has been England till I have been sometimes literally bored (Vol 1: "Guide to London"; Introduction)." "Here" in this sentence appears to refer to Indian. It is not known whether the introduction was written before or after the text, but it may be presumed that the work was commenced before Gandhiji left for South Africa in 1893. Gandhiji mentions the "morning coat... now five years old", which he must have bought on reaching London in September 1888; vide Vol 1: "Guide to London", chapter II. About the circumstances in which the MS was located, Pyarelal writes: "The existing copy was retrieved by me from a heap of papers littering the floor of the weaving shed in the Satyagraha Ashram at Sabarmati, shortly after my arrival there in 1920. It being shown to Gandhiji, he said that it had been made at his instance by one of his clerks in South Africa, who wrote a very bad hand, to improve his handwriting. Unfortunately some pages in the appendix are missing. The original could never be traced" (E.P.).

in England and elsewhere. But they have not gone further. They leave you in suspense, for they do create in you a desire for going to England, but how to do it they seem to have failed to tell. Scores of Indians have become barristers, yet no one has been bold to inform his countrymen how he managed to live in England. While there I received many