Category Archives: Book reviews

2000,  320p & notes

It seems that much ink has been spilled in Australia trying to define Australianness, and I had always assumed that this was a form of nationalistic adolescence that we would eventually outgrow.  Just as it’s hard to imagine your own parents as teenagers, it hadn’t occurred to me that the Mother Country herself might have undergone the same soul-searching.  But clearly the debate over Britishness and Englishness is a lively one. I’m aware of, but to my embarrassment have not read Linda Colley’s Britons, even though it sits on the shelf waiting to be read. However this book distances itself from the endeavour of explaining the distinction between Britishness and Englishness, and does not enter into the debate over the process by which the two concepts were developed.  Instead, Langford looks at “the things identified rather than the process of identification” (p. 2)  In particular he focuses on manners and character.

Langford argues that until about 1650, the English were viewed as Europe’s mavericks- capable occasionally of spasmodic splendour, but also prone to bouts of violence, turbulence and instability.  If pressed to nominate the point at which there was acceptance of the possibility of English pre-eminence, it probably came somewhere around the 1760s.   From the eighteenth-century on, there was increasing interest in England and its people from Continental travellers and an period of outright Anglo-mania, particularly on the part of the French, between the 1730s and 1780.  Langford draws on the travel writings of these visitors as his primary sources, much of which was written with the droll superciliousness not unknown to travel documentaries today.

He has divided his book into six main chapters: Energy, Candour, Decency, Taciturnity, Reserve and Eccentricity and these in turn are divided into subsections likewise headed by nouns- barbarity, domesticity, clubbability etc.  At times the distinctions are not clear-cut.  For example, the coverage of Liberty  under “Eccentricity” is not intuitive;  or the inclusion of Conversation, Oratory and Clubbability under “Taciturnity” undercuts the chapter heading somewhat. But as he says, “feelings are hard to distinguish from thoughts” (p.251), and hard to distinguish from actions as well.  They’re slippery things, feelings, and don’t always fit neatly under a heading.

The chapter structure of the book reflects the emphasis on affective concepts, as suggested by the title.  There is an underlying chronological thread to the argument as well, though, and it is not served well by the overarching structure.  He argues, as did Marjorie Morgan, that the Evangelicalism of the late 18th century gave rise to new ideals of behaviour, and he begins his two-century examination of the change in Englishness from the middle of the 17th century.  He notes that there is an evolution over time, but he does not give the chronological factor much prominence.  This a-chronological (if there is any such word) approach is underscored by the formatting of his  footnoting, where a primary source is dated on its first appearance, but not in subsequent citations.  Because there is no bibliography, it is nigh on impossible to locate a reference amongst his detailed footnotes to ascertain whether it is an observation made in the late seventeenth or mid-nineteenth century.  The footnoting format could well have been imposed by the publishers- although it would be a pity to learn that a University publisher was stepping back from academic conventions in this way- but it does not serve the book well.

Although not engaging at a theoretical level with the Britishness/Englishness identity debate, the foreign travellers that Langford cites can clearly differentiate between the English, Scots, Irish and Welsh in their observations.  Because he is drawing on such a large dragnet of observations, there are often inconsistencies between them, especially when closely related traits are discussed in separate sections of the book.  However this did not detract from his argument: instead it served to underline that character is just as much in the eye of the beholder as in the image that the subject wants to project, and just how complex, baffling and nuanced a ‘national character’ can be once you try to move beyond the stereotype.

1994,  148p.  & notes.

This is not a book about events or facts, but instead it is about ideals.  Ideals, suggests the author, reveal as much or more about a society as reality does. The ideals she is exploring are those found in three different genres of improving literature published from the late eighteenth century to the mid nineteenth century.

The first genre is the courtesy book, a literary type written primarily by and for men.  Courtesy books often took the form of an informal, practical guide written by an older man, based on his personal experience, for a younger man.  Some focussed on the arts of worldly success, others on civility and deportment, but underlying them all was the assumption that manners and morals were inseparable and indistinguishable.

The second genre is the conduct book, which became more popular under the influence of Evangelicalism in the mid-late 18th century.  The underlying principle was that religion- not fashion, or custom, nor taste- was the basis of both manners and morals.  The writers were middle class and many addressed female audiences.

Finally there were etiquette books, which emerged in the 1830s, even though etiquette itself had been around for much longer than that.  They did not so much create behavioural rules in the 1830s, as codify those that had been in existence for the previous 50 years. They were practical digests of rules and information to avoid vulgar behaviour, and unlike the Conduct Books, they were largely indifferent to one’s internal nature and character, moral paradigms or the spiritual domain.  Instead, the focus was on outward visible indicators and display.

She suggests that the etiquette book arose during the 1830s as  the upwardly mobile middle class became wealthier and the boundaries were blurred with the aristocracy.  However, she is at pains to point out that both the middle class and the aristocracy, in and among themselves, expressed conflicting values.  The middle class may have been industrial, but it also embraced an antithetical ethic that denigrated competition; the aristocracy combined elements of disinterestedness with aggressive competition.  Depending on the values under discussion, relations between the middle class and aristocracy could conflict with, or accommodate each other.

She has examined a huge range of texts across these three genres- her bibliography for these primary sources stretches to eight pages.   The whole enterprise of proscription and prescription of morals and manners was steeped in paradox.  The standards for fashionable behaviour were spelled out to facilitate social advancement, but at the same time, they kept changing so as to keep people out.   The evangelical moralists exhorted people of sound moral character to appear as they really were, but at the same time they were to avoid offending others and be reserved and modest and above all, sincere- even if they weren’t really.

However, she noted a change in the early 1840s, when etiquette books began to incorporate elements, albeit superficially at first, of principles of morality and ethics while continuing their emphasis on manners and decorum.  This trend manifested itself in the rise of professionalism whereby aristocratic and middle-class ideals were merged into legally sanctioned professional behavioural codes and credentials, firmly ground in etiquette and ethics, in a range of fields- the church, law, medicine, government and armed services.  It was an accommodation on the part of both the aristocracy and the middle class and both groups felt that they could embrace professional goals without feeling they had compromised their values.

Written in 1994, this book travels in the wake of Davidoff and Hall’s Family Fortunes which was first published in 1987.  Its argument is largely consistent with Davidoff and Hall, but it delves into the realm of ideals and expectations, rather than actual lives that figure so strongly in Davidoff and Hall’s book.  The earlier book took the middle class, and particularly women, as its focus, but Morgan’s book looks at the accommodation between both the aristocracy and the middle class, both in expectation of behaviour in the home and in the professions more widely.

This book interested me in relation to Judge Willis because I am examining his career from the 1820s to 1840s- precisely the time that these changes were occurring.   Our perception of  the early Victorian sensibility tends to be swamped by the depictions of behaviour and expectations so vividly drawn by the mid-Victorian novelists- our Dickens and Trollopes.  The settler colonial condition, both in Upper Canada and New South Wales, added more tension to already brittle upward mobility.   The Port Phillip newspapers carried in their columns the reports of fashions and observations about behaviour taken from metropolitan newspapers, and although these new societies brought together strangers into new constellations, you have the sense that, among those who aspired to colonial gentry at least, everyone was watching everyone else very closely.  There was a mental template for how one ought to behave, and this book provides one way of investigating this ideal- no matter how imperfectly it was met.

1994, 245p

This book is a series of essays that Cannadine wrote during the process of writing his Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy.  Having not read that book, I can only assume that the essays reflect aspects of the larger work, but in themselves they are self-contained and immensely readable.

Cannadine argues that, despite the assertion by the aristocracy itself of its unchanging nature and antiquity, the aristocracy was in fact transformed in the late eighteenth century. Because of a largely unexplained demographic crisis among English noble families at that time, estates were integrated and consolidated into supra-national empires, spanning England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland, thus leading to a new apex of super-rich grandees.  These were supplemented by self-made merchants, nabobs and industrialists who bought their way in, then established themselves as bona-fide landlords.  Public servants, too, fitted themselves out with the accoutrements of landed aristocracy.  That bible of gentility, Burkes Peerage, published in 1826  documented this new/old phenomenon, a hold that they maintained by making, in reality, very few concessions.

He picks up on the debate between David Spring and F.M.L. Thompson over aristocratic indebtedness, and especially the received Spring-ian view that the Regency families were spendthrifts, while their mid-Victorian sons moved towards sobriety and solvency in the mid 1800s. Cannadine finds that debt seemed to be an ongoing reality, though its arena changed- e.g. development of money markets with local attorneys and solicitors, banks, insurance companies etc.  There was borrowing to maintain and enhance family prestige e.g. to provide settlements for members of the family, to build houses and buy land, but there was also borrowing for profit e.g. improvement of land and investment in non-agricultural enterprises- especially coal mining and transport.  He concludes, therefore, that the distinction between early and mid-Victorian debt was overdrawn, and that if there is a pivotal period, rather than the 1840s  it is 1870-1880 when declining rentals and agricultural prices led to greater indebtedness.  When death duties were introduced in 1894, they were 10% of the property assessed higher than 1 million pounds- ruinous if a property was heavily encumbered.

Cannadine points out that

while biographers are conscious of the things that make their subjects unique, historians are more concerned with seeing individuals in the context of their times and class (p.3)

The rest of the book deals with different dynastic and individual portraits that illustrate his central thesis.  Lord Curzon is depicted as a “ceremonial impressario” whose stage-craft embodied and shaped the image and consciousness of empire. Winston Churchill he sees as inherently unrespectable in both his relatives and choice of friends: he was politically suspect and unpredictable, and essentially paternalistic and anti-democratic.  The Cozens-Hardy family of Norfolk exemplify the ‘new’ upper class, spreading across trade, the law, local paternalist government and local/antiquarian history.  Nicholson/Sackville-West are addressed less as sexual and literary oddities than as exemplars of the snobbish, anachronistic, sheltered and nostalgic twentieth-century upper class.

To prove, eventually, that he has a political purpose, Cannadine closes with a condemnation of country-house worship that embalms what their owners themselves were happy to demolish, and transforms country houses into shrines to private galleries, a risible moral superiority and an unconscionable claim on public money.

Enough of snobbery and nostalgia.  Good riddance to ignorant and sentimental deference. It is time we got beyond the country house (p.245)

That’s telling ’em.

1981, 305 p.

I am of an age and political bent that makes me fairly dismissive of aristocracy and I bridle at deference demanded on the basis of birth or wealth alone.  On the other hand, I must admit a sneaking fascination, tinged with horrified incredulity, at lifestyles and attitudes that seem so foreign to me and yet part of the cultural baggage that comes from growing up in a Commonwealth country.  Since I have started my thesis, I have often been frustrated by the impermanence of the titles by which a person was known:  Viscounts turn into Earls, not just Viscount Bill to Earl Bill but Viscount Bill to Earl Ben.  Meanwhile family names (surnames to the rest of us) coexist with titles, so that one person can move through an array of names and titles within one lifetime. Conversely one title can, within a few decades, be held by several people.

This is one of Simon Winchester’s early works, published in 1981 but actually written in 1976 when he was still a journalist and travel writer.  The hiatus between manuscript and publication is interesting: the book was held up because of threats of legal action against the author by some of the peers he interviewed.   It finally emerged, it would seem, with the legal assistance of the “redoubtable scholar of Scots peerage lore”, the splendidly named Sir Iain Moncrieffe of that Ilk (yes, that’s his whole name), whom Winchester thanks in his preface.  He also thanks Hugh Mongomery-Massingberd of Burke’s Peerage as well, but he did not return the favour.  In a review of the revised and finally released book  in the Times, 28 Jan 1982, Mongomery-Massingberd responded to Winchester, “a drippingly wet liberal” by writing:

Apart from the cuts imposed by the lawyers, one wonders how much real revision has been undertaken by the author; the book is frequently out of date.  The learned Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk has clearly had a hand in the overhaul; many of the pithy footnotes can be confidently attributed to this colourful scholar…To be fair to Mr Winchester this second attempt is an improvement on his first- as far as I can recall the “suppressed” version contained about one mistake a page, this time the average is nearer one to every two-and-a-half pages.  As he has regaled us with so many meaningless statistics I offer these by way of exchange: from a total of some 259 pages of actual text (as opposed to absurd maps, corny or pointless epigraphs etc) I counted very nearly 100 errors ranging from really whopping howlers to mere misspellings of names. This is surely unacceptable for any book with even half a claim to be taken seriously.

While I certainly didn’t take the umbrage that Hugh Mongomery-Massingberd (where DID that ‘t’ in Montgomery go?), I do agree with the dated feel to the book, but probably not for the same reasons.  I raised an eyebrow at the designation of the Labour party as the “Socialist Party” complete with capital S.    What about Thatcher? What about Lady Di? I asked.  But, on closer investigation, I have become muddled over dates and chronology.  He does mention Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, but she had not, when he wrote the book, yet created the last three hereditary peers (Viscount Whitelaw (Wille Whitelaw) created in 1990, Viscount Tonypandy (Thomas- a Labour Party politician)created  in 1983 and the Earl of Stockton(Harold Macmillan)  in 1984).  Lady Diana Spencer, whose royal descent brought the peerage into full view only became engaged and married to Prince Charles in 1981.  So it was not so much that Winchester’s work was dated, as that these events had not yet occurred.

Winchester goes through the five ranks of the peerage, from highest to lowest.  For this, I am grateful.  I have now devised my own mnemonic, using the names of my children, to keep them straight in my own mind: Dean and Martine Eat Victoria Bitter.  (Duke, Marquis, Earl, Viscount Baron).  Yes, I know that it doesn’t make sense.  Yes, I know I could have them “enjoying” Victoria Bitter, or eating “Vita Brits”.  I like it the way it is:  it works for me, and that’s all that matters.

Dukes are the highest, and at the time of writing this book there were only twenty-five surviving, not including the three Dukes of the Blood Royal or the Duke of Edinburgh.  Fewer than 500 men have been Dukes in the last six and a half centuries they have existed.  They are called “Your Grace”, not “My Lord”, and the monarch calls them “Our right trusty and right entirely beloved cousin”.

Then come the Marquesses, which has always struck me as a rather effeminate name.  Its origin is the Latin marchio, referring to the Continental counts who guarded the “marches”, the borders with neighbouring countries.  Apparently it’s not a particularly well-received honour, and often the Earls who follow them in precedence are wealthier. There were thirty-seven when the book was written, with the last created in 1936.  Many Viceroys of India were awarded the honour.

The Earls are the backbone of the British peerage system, with Lord Lucan one of the more notorious twentieth century ones.  At the time of writing there were 173 non-Irish Earls and Countesses dotted around the country. They are often of Old English or Scots county stock, distinguished heroes, or ex-Prime Ministers.

They are followed by the Viscounts- 110 of them in 1981.  They are a recently revived rank, with more than a hundred created in the twentieth century.  Here there can be detected the rewards for mercantilism, with the captains of industry often being awarded the title.  Few are landowners to any great degree,  but they do not lack money.

The Barons are the broad base of the pyramid, with 438 men and women in 1981.  Hereditary barons are no longer created : since 1958 with the Life Peerages Act, they are now life peers.   The bulk of the baronage is of twentieth-century origin, with many war heroes being awarded the honour after WWII, and industrial figures, civil servants, judges, politicians, scientists, writers and artists being recognized  with the title.

The Irish Peers,  left out in the cold, are awarded their own chapter.

The book has a chatty, journalistic tone as the author travels around the countryside, conducting interviews with various worthies.  There are direct quotes, and quite a bit of paraphrasing but it is reported without much rigour in a strictly historical sense.  There is a reading list, organized alphabetically by title (rather than author), and although David Cannadine is quoted as the one academic text, the title of his work is not included in the reference list.  Each chapter begins with a map, showing the distribution of the title under discussion, but I found my lack of knowledge of British geography rather limiting here- a label or two wouldn’t have gone astray.

Near the end of the book he tries, without success, to establish the land holdings of the nobility. Interestingly enough, it was a very difficult endeavour with few firm official figures available- intentionally so.  It is obviously a question that powerful people did not want answered, at least in the 1980s.  His conclusion?

On Spaceship Earth, ennoblement by reason of fortuitous birth has no place: the British nobility, decent a body of men and women as well they may be, have outlived their usefulness, and must go quietly, out by the back door. (p. 305)

And it seems, by the House of Lords Act of 1999, that certainly things have changed since the book was written, and no doubt will change even further.

This book is not academic and seems to have sunk without a trace- Simon Winchester’s own webpage certainly underplays it.  I think that perhaps it was a book of its time, written largely for a home audience, and surpassed by his later work.