"Eminent Victorians" and "The Uncommon Reader"

February 18 2014

     I had an eighth grade English teacher, Richard Peck, who used to say that "our age likes to see the feet of clay of its idols".  That trend was created by one man, Lytton Strachey, whose "Eminent Victorians" offered brief biographies of "the great and the good" that punctured their magnificence. Alexander Woolcott, who included Strachey's biography of Cardinal Manning in his "Woolcott Reader", observed that what Strachey practiced was not so much biography as "ironical deflation".  Woolcott includes in his anthology Strachey's brief biography of Cardinal Manning, who took holy orders in the Church of England, and died a Roman Catholic cardinal, having, in between, become a well-known champion of the Pope and London's poor.
 
     Strachey suggests that Manning --who became archbishop of Westminster Cathedral, and thereby spiritual leader of Britain's Roman Catholics-- was astutely self-effacing.  He took himself out of  consideration for advancement only to emerge as the only acceptable candidate for this committee or that commission; with the result that his reputation and influence grew.  In 1889 he successfully  mediated the London Dock Strike, which threatened social peace there.  He expanded the number of Catholic schools in London, and gave of his time tirelessly in pursuit of better conditions for the poor.  He had gone to Oxford and been close friends with Gladstone, who ended his friendship with  Manning after the latter's conversion.  Gladstone was deeply suspicious the doctrine of "papal infallibility", promulgated by Pope Pius IX, to whom Manning owed his ascendancy.  In numerous newspaper articles, he attacked the doctrine as "undemocratic";  Manning defended it, alluding to Gladstone as a friend without reference to their breach.  The two men were similar in their taste for self-denial: Gladstone would visit prostitutes, hoping to convert them away from their profession.  Excited by the encounters, he would then go home and flagellate himself in punishment for the urges the women aroused in him.  Manning seems to have had no similar urges, but the austerity of his life made a wraith of him in old age. Strachey acknowledges all of this, but suggests that the eminence Manning achieved reflected a deep-seated ambition.  That ambition was frustrated in its original direction,politics; but Manning being Manning, he found a way to fulfill his ambition for glory in a way that would never bring reproach.  By the biography's end, unless you know more about Manning, he might be a Victorian Julian Sorel.  It is Strachey's innovation to plant seeds of doubt about the reputations of those who once went to their deaths secure in the knowledge their reputations would stand, intact --something no eminent person in contemporary life can ever be sure of.

     Alan Bennett, on the other hand, exalts Queen Elizabeth II, the subject of his 2007 novella, "The Uncommon Reader".  A keen observer of the rituals that ring the British monarchy and preserve its lustre, Bennett creates a Queen who is very much as most of us imagine her: conventional, yet intellectually sharp.  The two qualities never collide, Bennett lets us see, because her "job" --to travel  in her dominions and to spend as much time as she can lending an air of specialness to what would otherwise be mundane plant openings, ship launchings and garden shows-- never requires her to delve deeply into the life circumstances of the people she meets, her subjects.   Similarly, her subjects don't expect her to be anyone other than the person they've seen in the photographs in Majesty and other, similarly hagiographic outlets for information about the Royal Family.

     Bennett takes the Queen we think we know and puts her in a place she never expected to find herself in: a mobile lending library parked outside the Palace grounds, behind the kitchens.  Following one of her corgis, which has strayed, she comes upon the library truck and enters to find a young man who works in her kitchens browsing the shelves and another, the man in charge of the lending library, shelving.  Acutely sensitive to the disturbance her presence causes, to be polite, she takes away a volume by Ivy Compton-Burnett  --and gets hooked on reading.

     The transformative power of the book is celebrated in "The Uncommon Reader". The title plays with the title of Virginia Woolf's book of essays on writing and reading "The Common Reader".  In the collection, Woolf implicitly argued that reviewers ought to look at books, not from their perches as specialists, but as better-informed stand-ins for the intellectually curious, but average book-buyer, Everyman.

     No one could be less Everyman than the Queen, but Bennett is able to maker her character a vessel for the idea that reading is transforming, whether you are a king or a commoner.  The novella has a plot and a clever dénouement, but because I think The Uncommon Reader a book everyone ought to experience unadulterated, I will not write of it.  Lots of good writers pen defenses of reading, but Bennett manages to simultaneously indulge our fantasies about the Queen while reminding us of the deep pleasures of reading, and their private nature.  Being (unlike Lytton Strachey) no iconoclast, the Queen of The Uncommon Reader is one even the present incumbent could unreservedly enjoy getting to know --if she ever gets the time to read.