Recent reading

[regshoe]

Family Secrets: Living with Shame from the Victorians to the Present Day by Deborah Cohen (2013). A history book built around a general idea rather than a specific historical topic, this book explores the details of various common sources of 'family secrets' between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries—the mixed-race children of British men who made their fortunes in empire in India and their Indian mistresses; the turbulent details of troubled marriages brought to light in the Divorce Court in the 1850s; developmentally disabled children; illegitimate babies and adoption thereof; and queer men considered as relations—before examining changing ideas about secrets and privacy and the factors that led from the 'repressed' secret-keeping culture of the Victorians to the 'confessional' modern culture. It's a fascinating subject, and Cohen brings in loads of relevant and interesting detail, although I confess I was more interested in the specific details of the chapter topics than in the general subject. I especially enjoyed the discussion of changing attitudes to intellectual disabilities—Cohen shows how an 'idiot' child of a middle-class British family in the nineteenth century, while clearly not in a great position, was often openly acknowledged and loved, while a similarly-positioned child a century later was seen as a shameful secret to be hidden away and abandoned. The writing is very readable, although I found it a bit too far on the 'popular history' end of the spectrum—too much emphasis on telling an engaging story and not enough on historical detail—and there were a couple of annoying errors probably originating from Cohen being an American writing about British history (no, 'liberal' is not an appropriate term to describe radical progressives' support for women's suffrage in the 1900s!...).

Agatha's Husband by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik (1853). I felt in the mood for something Victorian, and you can always count on DMMC to be extremely Victorian (she said, in a tone of affectionate exasperation). Anyway, Agatha Bowen is a rich young heiress, rather unconventionally-minded, without any family and frustrated by her life in London and the shallow friends by whom she's surrounded. It's partly her desire to get away from this life that leads her to agree to marry a man she doesn't love; also she likes and respects Nathanael Harper a good deal, and she's humbled by the depth and seriousness of his love for her. So they marry, and from here the plot twists and turns with secrets, betrayals and rural Dorset scenery in plenty, while Agatha, in the midst of a lot of emotional drama and turmoil, slowly comes to love her husband in truth. As ever I enjoy Craik's writing on the sentence, and particularly the dialogue, level, and the book is full of memorable characters—I especially liked Harriet, Agatha's lively new sister-in-law, and her husband Marmaduke 'Duke' Dugdale, an oddly-matched but adorable pair. But my goodness, it is very Victorian. Craik has Views on Gender and Marriage, very few of them are good and they intrude on the plot constantly; she makes no attempt to deal with the real ethical issues of e.g. Nathanael keeping secret from Agatha what's happened to her money, which was probably the most frustrating part of the book for me. Craik's emotions are better than her politics! I was struck by her fairly open acknowledgement of Agatha's romantic feelings for another woman, the saintly Anne Valery—those socially acceptable romantic friendships again, I suppose. And Craik's favourite topic of disability and invalids comes up again; the character in question, Elizabeth Harper, another sister-in-law, is neither particularly important to the plot nor present for much of the action, but Craik gives her great symbolic and emotional importance (in a way that's also very Victorian). I shall pretend that the book ends with Agatha and Anne ditching their respective love interests and setting up as rational, industrious philanthropical spinsters together.

Told by an Idiot by Rose Macaulay (1923). An odd one! It's partly a satire about the various periods of history between 1879, when the action opens, and 1923, and of the general concept of historical periods and in fact of history itself; and partly the story of how this piece of history plays out in the lives of one family, the Gardens, over three generations. The various characters are something between absurd caricatures and larger-than-life exaggerations of different historical trends and attitudes—the father who converts to a different religious sect every few years, cycling through all the weird Victorian and turn-of-the-century religious movements Macaulay can think of; the daughter, Stanley, who enthusiastically and whole-heartedly takes up every new aesthetic and political movement as it comes along, whether Arts and Crafts, imperial jingoism or women's suffrage; the son, Maurice, who begins as an impassioned socialist speaking against the injustices of the day and ends as a bitter journalist speaking against basically everything. It's all very entertaining, although the mood is a bit uneven at times—it takes odd dips from ridiculous satire into serious drama which didn't really work for me. Most of all I enjoyed the sheer wealth of historical detail which Macaulay describes for each period she writes about and the vivid sense of each time as it passes, as well as her rants on the concept of distinct historical periods and her Opinions on the progress of history in general. The general sense of... hmm, what it feels like for this or that period to be The Present Day?... felt at times really very familiar; a good reminder that the world has always been this confused and chaotic, or at least it has since the 1870s. Rose Macaulay is an author who's been on my list to check out for a while, and I hear good things about some of her other books; after this one I'll certainly give the others a try.

Comments

[oursin]

I was a bit ambivalent about the Cohen book - in particular I thought she was vastly over-generalising about developmentally-disabled offspring of the middle classes in the Victorian era. I daresay those who were - like the case I recall - not obviously physically deformed and fairly well-behaved - might have been kept at home as part of the family but I suspect in other cases other expedients were in play and they were concealed if not abandoned to an institution (these started quite early, too).

[regshoe]

Hmm—that's good to know! That great a contrast did seem somewhat surprising.