Volume 3, Number 9 · December 17, 1964
The Edwardians
By Bernard Bergonzi
Edwardian England 1901-1914
edited with a Preface by Simon Nowell-Smith
Oxford, 620 pp., $15.00
Even those disinclined to read the text might find this sumptuous volume—a companion to such earlier Oxford titles as Shakespeare's England and Early Victorian England—a potent instrument for the production of nostalgia. The photographs alone would guarantee that; published separately, with jazzier captions, they would be a certainty for the gift-book market. Perhaps the most beautiful is the view of Portland Place taken in 1906 by the admirable Alvin Langdon Coburn, which is reproduced on the book's jacket: a silhouetted hansom cab is moving wearily away from the camera, the long street in front of it hazy with a touch of fog, the ground miry and uneven; the cabbie is a bulky figure wearing a bowlerhat and, just visibly, a beard: there is something about him that faintly recalls the weighty, genial figure of King Edward. Most of the other illustrations fail to achieve this poetic suggestiveness, but they have a substantial if mostly extra-aesthetic interest: in a cluttered drawing room a housemaid proudly demonstrates a primitive vacuum cleaner, of alarming complication of design; suffragettes march in academic robes; Girl Guides stand saluting in a long line, barely suppressing their giggles; Max Reinhardt presents Oedipus Rex at Covent Garden with a huge gesturing chorus. As well as photographs, the visual art of the period is fairly well represented, as, for instance, with the precious but genuine charm of an Arthur Rackham illustration to Peter Pan, or the specimen of art nouveau bookbinding that exhibits, In a somewhat concentrated form, a vogue that has lately become fashionable again.
Review, 1702 words
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