Victoriana

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28974, 15 August 1959, Page 3

Victoriana

Young Victorians. By Marion Lochhead. John Murray. 240 pp.

The reader of this delightful book can have but one complaint —that he missed its predecessor, “Their First 10 Years.” if he was indeed so unfortunate. Miss Lochhead has collected an immense amount of material relating to the adolescence of distinguished and obscure Victorians, and, what is more important she has digested this material so ably

as to give an impression of casual chat, when she is in fact revealing 'countless details, retrieved from the obscurity of blue hooks and ephemeral periodicals. This is a work of the very best kind of ■ dilettante scholarship,- a genre almost extinct in our learned academies. i Miss Lpchhead also reveals a great respect and affection for the Victorians, but at the same time : views them dispassionately and i tempers her admiration with measured irony. Quoting the ■ Queen, who remarked in her diary that her uncle, William IV, was very odd and singular, she observes: “Odd is a nqeiosis, but this quality had if anything endeared him to a people who enjoy eccentricity”; of the Queen compared with her predecessors: “The sentimental heart of the public throbbed to the appeal of innocent majesty after reigns which, though never lacking elegance, had attained innocence only through witlessness”: and of the founding of Lady Margaret Hall: “There were only two books in the library: ‘A Treatise of Science and Colour’ and a copy of ‘The Newcomes,’ thus representing, if inadequately, science and literature."

We have accounts of the education of many celebrities, including Miss Beale and Miss Buss. J. M. Barrie, Burne-Jones and William Morris, as well as a host of lesser figures who were yet articulate enough to record the impressions which their education made on them.

The charge of gentility which the caviller might level against the book is rebutted by two chapters on the poor in which the horrors of life for the lower orders are plainly admitted, but by design the greater part of the book is taken up with the education of gentlefolk not persons. Miss Lochhead looks on the bright side but without compromising her honesty.