Eminent Victorians.
Wilson, A. N.
Place Published: Scranton, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.
Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc,
Date Published: 1990.
Description: 8vo - over 7" - 9" tall. STATED FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING. 240 pages. Black & white photo illustrated. The book and dust jacket are NEAR FINE. The book has two small bumps to bottom board edges and owners inscription on ffep. The dust jacket has minor shelf and edgewear. NOT price-clipped. NOT remaindered. Book comes with BRODART jacket cover. JMVintage specializes in books, magazines, and treasures related to the Duke & Duchess of Windsor..and other curious subjects. Dust jacket notes read: "In 1918 Lytton Strachey published a book of four elegant, satirical biographies which devastated the heros of the Victorian era and their virtues. In this new book, prize-winning biographer and novelist A. N. Wilson borrows the title Eminent Victorians in order to turn Strachey's interpretation on its head. For where Strachey saw only the comic fustiness of morals and manners in an older generation, Wilson celebrates a period of astonishing vitality, creativity, and change through the lives of six memorable individuals: Prince Albert, the German prince who created the British monarchy as we know it; Charlotte Bronte, whose Jane Eyre was a triumph of fantasy fashioned out of the claustrophobic reality of her own life; William Gladstone, the greatest statesman of the age, who saw with prophetic clarity what would happen if the Irish were not allowed to govern themselves; John Henry , Newman, the Anglican clergyman who scandalized his contemporaries by leaving the Church of England to become a Roman Catholic-and eventually a cardinal; Josephine Butler, the social reformer and feminist who ' exposed the pious contradictions of Victorian sexual morality; and Julia Margaret Cameron, a pioneer in photography who found her calling almost by accident in middle age, and went on to record so many of the most memorable images of the Victorian era. Brilliantly written and deeply felt, these brief biographies reveal the works and spirit of the period in an entirely new light. Paying tribute to both his model and his subject, Wilson writes: 'No one will ever write a funnier book about the Victorians than Lytton Strachey did, nor one more elegant. What I have tried to suggest in this book is that there really were 'giants in those days' We share a common humanity with the people in the past, even when they baffle us, and puzzle us. It is common humanity with the Victorians which we have recovered. In recovering it, we also recover no small sense of their greatness.' A. N. WILSON was born in 1950. He was a scholar of New College, Oxford, where he later taught English language and literature for a number of years. From the late 1970s on, he was a prolific journalist, contributing to the Times Literary Supplement, the New States- man, the Observer, the Sunday Telegraph, and the Daily Mail. For two years he was literary editor of the Spectator. More recently, he has concentrated largely on writing books the most recently published being a novel, Incline Our Hearts, and a widely acclaimed biography of C. S. Lewis. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in London."
Edition: First editionBinding: Hard Back
Condition: Near Fine in Near Fine dj
ISBN: 0393028488
Book Id: 9649
Price: $32.50
