Book Selection of the Month: “After the Victorians” by A.N. Wilson
ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (August 2010): After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World by A.N. Wilson
Before we get to England: I wrote about the Victorian-era goings-on in my own hometown, Norwich, CT, in last month’s Book Selection entry — and I’m still learning things about the Norwich of that era, thanks to Mom. She informs me that Teddy Roosevelt’s second wife, Edith Kermit Carow, was born in Norwich and moved to New York, becoming childhood friends with Roosevelt and eventually bearing him many pillow-fighting, rollerskating children, as well as tending to the White House’s menagerie of pets, which included a badger, a bear, a hyena, snakes, dogs, and more.
Meanwhile, across the ocean, though, an era was ending, with the death of Queen Victoria. Back around the time her era began, incidentally, the old British standards of length and mass were altered — by a fire, oddly enough, since an 1834 conflagration destroyed the Houses of Parliament and took the official physical units used to define length and mass with them, which is not a topic covered in After the Victorians but is so odd I had to mention it.
(Interestingly, though the U.S. has never converted to the metric system, we began defining our units by reference to the metric system in 1893, which means that since that time we’ve unwittingly been using Progressive measurements. Ha ho! But more about the Progressives in next month’s Book Selection entry, which will be about Martin Sklar’s The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism — and maybe something by one Judge Andrew Napolitano while I’m at it.)
And now, seriously, or at least half-seriously, on to After the Victorians: The book is a fun blend of serious, detailed history and utterly trashy, vaguely self-loathing tabloid anecdotes, a tone well suited to looking back upon the wreckage of the British Empire from the perspective of a cynical twenty-first century writer. An important point Wilson makes is one I mentioned in my closing comments after last week’s debate on imperialism at Lolita Bar: The British Empire was primarily an Asian rather than a European empire, if we take the sheer demographic weight of India seriously (on a similar but more petty note, it’s often struck me that with so many speakers of English living in India, it’s not clear that any nation besides India has a right to define what constitutes standard English).
The artificial construct that was the Empire was bound to come apart sooner or later — and the early twentieth century was enamored of trying new things, as Wilson reminds us in sometimes-odd passages like this one: “The flying machines and motor cars of the Edwardian era look like toys built for the amusement of Mr. Toad, but they are harbingers of a new world order. Moreover, the Mr. Toad at the wheel would be unlikely to have owned Toad Hall for more than a generation.” (This passage also reminds me a bit of the poem I wrote in college that enabled me to come in third at a Nuyorican Poets Cafe slam once, a poem that began with the lines “Stork! Stork in a gyrocopter!/ Grim harbinger of the coming age.” Ah, great minds, etc.)
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In the process of depicting the Empire unraveling, Wilson treats us to such telling oddities as the despicable D.H. Lawrence writing about his fantasies of gassing to death all of the sick, Read the rest of this entry »
