Glory of Life

1934

Private Collection. Reproduced by permission of the Robert Gibbings Estate and the Heather Chalcroft Literary Agency

Waltham St Lawrence, Berkshire: The Golden Cockerel Press

Gibbings first met essayist Llewelyn Powys (1884-1939) in December 1932, a week after Powys had sent him the manuscript for Glory of Life. They felt an immediate affinity for each other: both of their fathers were Reverends, both eschewed their religious upbringing, and both had a fervent love of the natural world. Even though Gibbings had sold the GCP in August 1933, he was still involved in the production of Powys’ Glory of Life, which is a powerful read on atheism. Powys wrote that the ‘true religion is the religion of the atheist’, he decried the ‘folly uttered by the cream-dipped clergy’ and was ‘amazed that their sentimental fables have persisted so long’. Powys promoted the worship of the natural world, believed that worship ‘belongs to the glory of life, to the unuttered sense of glory in the chance of existence…’. Critics say that this work contains some of Gibbings’s finest engravings.