Volume 32, Number 7 · April 25, 1985
Paradise Enow!
By Noel Annan
With Friends Possessed: A Life of Edward FitzGerald
by Robert Bernard Martin
Atheneum, 313 pp., $17.95
An excellent book could be written on the Victorian bachelor. Some never intended to be bachelors. Senior subalterns in regiments of the line waiting until their forties for promotion, college dons waiting for country livings whose incumbents declined to die, men waiting to inherit from a distant kinsman, clerks in the civil service who had to keep up appearances and could not afford to set up house in the style which they imagined was expected of them—who, when at last their constraints were removed, shuddered at the thought of giving up their comfortable bachelor habits and forgoing the petty tyrannies by which they kept up their morale.
Review, 3562 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |