AT first glance Betjemania accounts for this selection of the bits and pieces of prose England's favourite pet of a poet contributed to various sources in his often lucrative and always prolific career. As the editor, Betjeman's daughter acknowledges in her introduction the poet had a low opinion of his prose but she feels there is an audience for it: ''I am also proud of, and want to boast about, his consistent and extraordinary vision and prescience.'' There is no evidence of ''extraordinary vision'' but there are decent insights.

In an article in the Architectural Review of December 1931, Betjeman deplored modish fashion-mongers who - with the arrogance of ignorance - trashed traditions in building for the future. In an Evening Standard review of June 1935 he praised Hitchcock's The Thirty-Nine Steps as an improvement on the original Buchan novel. In a contribution to Light and Lighting, November 1953, he eloquently expressed his love of lamp-posts. In a review in Time and Tide, December 1953, he preferred the light verse of Lear to the heavy verse of Tennyson.

And here's what he had to say about Glasgow in a feature in the Daily telegraph in June 1959: ''At Anderston Cross, built in the middle of the last century, I visited the worst slums I have ever seen. The stone buildings, four and five storeys high, looked solid enough on their street faces. Enter one of the archways to the courtyards which they enclose, and you will see the squalor. Small children with no park or green place for miles play in rubbish bins with dead cats and mutilated artificial flowers for toys. Spiral stone stairs, up which prams and bicycles have to be carried, lead to two-storey tenements with one lavatory for four families.''

Mind you, he loved the Glasgow School of Art as does Everyman.

He also loved the poems of T S Eliot. And the poems of Philip Larkin, a like-minded Little Englander he knew well.

Reviewing Larkin's classic collection, The Whitsun Weddings, in the Listener in March 1964 he opened emotionally with a tribute on lines on love as defined by the monumental couple in An Arundel Tomb: The stone fidelity/They hardly mean has come to be/Their final blazon, and to prove?Our almost-instinct almost true/What will survive of us is love. Betjeman comes across as a fine man when prosaically discussing the fine arts. It was all so different in the same editor's anthology of the Letters of Betjeman (first volume taking us from 1926 to 1951, second taking us to 1984). There it was apparent that the world of Betjeman was one of public school and social climbing, light verse and varsity, fine wine and first editions, Victorian values and architecture, dotty men and doting women with titles or double-barrelled names or childish nicknames.

Writing to Mrs Pryce-Jones from Oxford, in 1927, Betjeman explained her son, nicknamed Bog, was well on the way to being ''universally popular'', which was obviously the thing for bright young things to be. Introducing the letters, Candida - nicknamed Waba - claimed her old man was ''universally loved''. Like the verse of Betjeman, the universe of Betjemania could be limited. He wanted good fortune more than poetic fame and made it his business to court aristocratic favours. In 1929, he wanted to elope with Lady Mary St Clair-Erskine (later Lady Mary Dunn) daughter of the Earl and Countess of Rosslyn. He wrote her letters lamenting his tough luck: ''Because I will not go into business my father has virtually cut me off . . . I am off to be a prep school master in Barnet at a hundred and eighty pounds a year.'' Though the lady sympathised with him she turned down his proposal of marriage.

Penelope, the woman Betjeman married in 1933, was the daughter of Field-Marshall Sir Philip Chetwode. Lycett Green revealed her mother did not think she was pretty enough to marry an aristocrat so settled for Betjeman who nicknamed her Filth and in the beginning expressed his affection for her in childish love chat. When Lady Penelope converted to Roman Catholicism, Anglo-Catholic Betjeman was not amused. He wrote to her about doctrinal division putting a distance between them: ''I was jealous of Rome and RC interests of yours, Rome as a Church, that is to say an organisation, for further pulling us apart.'' Ironically Betjeman turned to another woman who tried to convert him to Communism.

Though Lady Penelope regarded her husband as an intellectual, his most thoughtful letters were those of a simple-minded soul. Defending his religious faith in 1939, Betjeman solved the problems of the world: ''There should be no slums, bullying should be curbed, armaments should be abolished, hysterical people should be psycho-analysed, prisons should be reformed.'' Just like that.

In the same letter he recommended Eliot's Family Reunion as a Christian answer to scepticism. Eliot had taught Betjeman at Highgate School in 1916 and the minor poet had fond memories of the master as he acknowledged on writing to him in 1936: ''You were known as the American Master and I remember that as a boy told me you were a poet but I didn't believe it.'' Another letter to Eliot sycophantically saluted ''a great man'' and ended by stating: ''I am now a wine snob.'' Forget the wine. Betjeman was simply a snob.

The private letters, it now appears, did not do Betjeman justice. If you want to judge the pet who became Poet Laureate you should read his poetry as published and his prose as preserved in his book.