Volume 50, Number 6 · April 10, 2003
Victoria's Secrets
By John D. Rosenberg
The Victorians
by A.N. Wilson
Norton, 724 pp., $35.00
Inventing the Victorians
by Matthew Sweet
St. Martin's, 264 pp., $23.95
A.N. Wilson thinks big and writes prolifically. Among his twenty-eight novels and biographies is a controversial life of Jesus. He is also something of a disaster buff. The Victorians opens with the ancient Houses of Parliament burning in a spectacular conflagration on the night of October 16, 1834, a flaming emblem, Wilson writes, 'of the old world being done away with, purged and destroyed.' His book ends, nearly seven hundred pages later, with the aged, disease-wasted Queen Victoria being lowered into a casket crowded with memorabilia—bracelets, rings, lockets, plaster casts of the hands of those she loved, the dressing gown of her long-mourned Albert—a coffin as cluttered as the mantelpieces of her subjects, whose compulsion to collect expressed their need to grasp at stability in a world in radical transformation.
Review, 3667 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. |