Après The Victorians …

Abstract

March 13, 2008 (7:35 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2702\russell 27,2 054.wpd 280 Reviews APRÈS THE VICTORIANS … Kirk Willis History / U. of Georgia Athens, ga 30602–1602, usa kw@uga.edu A.yN. Wilson. After the Victorians: the Decline of Britain in the World. London: Hutchinson; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005 (hb); New York: Picador, 2006 (pb). isbn 0-312-42515-5. us$32.50; us$18.00 (pb). Pp. xii, 609. Poet, novelist, biographer, anthologist,literary critic, and cultural commentator , A.yN. Wilson is one of Britain’s most prominent and productive contemporary men of letters. Most at home with religious themes and individuals, he has written popular biographies of Jesus, St. Paul, Tolstoy, Milton, C.yS. Lewis, and Hilaire Belloc, edited The Faber Book of Church and Clergy, collected the religious writings of Tolstoy, and featured religious themes conspicuously in his many novels. Most comfortable intellectually in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he has in recent years moved into the cultural history of this periodz—zproducing a collection of his own Eminent Victorians in 1983 and a survey of The Victorians in 2003. Full of sharply drawn pen portraitures, lively anecdotes, and tartly expressed opinions, these books have won a wide audience, if far from a universally approving critical reception. Hard on the heels of his successful depiction of the Victorians, Wilson has now extended his account into the Wrst half of the twentieth centuryz—zfrom the death of Victoria in 1901 to the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. As with its companion volume, After the Victorians is more cultural sketch than academic history. Indeed, as a work of history it lacks any sense of historical causation and is resolutely descriptive and judgmental rather than explanatory and detached. Wilson, indeed, seems not so much interested in explaining the pastz—zor even in accounting for current conditionsz—zas in telling some good stories, settling some festering scores, passing some harsh judgments, praising some admired individuals , and bemoaning the fact that the Britain of the old Queen, Gladstone, and Disraeli has gone to the dogs. Not for nothing is the book subtitled “the Decline of Britain in the World”. A reader of After the Victorians therefore learns a great deal about Wilson’s own likes and (especially) dislikes concerning literature, politics, religion, and war but not much about the larger social, economic, scientiWc, and technological changes that transformed Britain in the Wrst half of the twentieth century. Possessing a nice line in invective and an enviable Xuency in presenting literary and March 13, 2008 (7:35 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2702\russell 27,2 054.wpd Reviews 281 political vignettes, Wilson peppers his text with bright, funny, and caustic set pieces which he leaves the reader to string together and to make larger sense of. The Liberal Prime Minister H.yH. Asquith, for example, is described as “languid , emotional, sexually obsessed and clever in a second-rate sort of way” (p. 183), while the press lords NorthcliTe and Beaverbrook are dismissed as “appalling vulgarians” (p. 186), and Lord Louis Mountbatten, to oTer a Wnal example, is condemned Wercely for his role in managing Indian and Pakistani independence in 1947: “By his superWcial haste, his sheer arrogance, his inattention to vital detail, and his unwillingness to provide the huge peace-keeping forces which could have protected migrant populations, Mountbatten was responsible for as many deaths as some of those who were hanged after the Nuremberg trials” (p. 495). Given his robustly expressed Conservative sympathies and Christian faith, it should be no surprise that Wilson does not number Bertrand Russell among his intellectual icons. In The Victorians Wilson contented himself with a mention of how the young Russell had, with the equally youthful G.yE. Moore, “broken with the Idealists and adopted the philosophy ofz ‘realism’z” (New York: Norton, 2003, p. 569). No longer believing metaphysically that “truth is a unity”, Wilson asserted, Russell had then been led ineluctably into any number of errors and had catapulted into a “career [with] a violent disjunction between the belief in vast impersonal realitiesz—zlogical or mathematical truthz—zand the vacillations of his wholly irrational, often self...