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rosekk's review against another edition
1.0
I've said before that I prefer histories where the personality and opinions of the author are clear in the text. I don't trust history books that claim to be objective, and pretend their author has somehow managed to research a topic in great detail without forming any opinion of their own. This book has the opposite problem. The authors personality is everywhere, and I don't like that personality very much at all. Things were off to a bad start when it became clear that the author has a nauseating level of rosy nostalgia for the days when the English aristocracy got away with everything, and the rest of the world were so much dirt beneath their feet. My opinion fell further (I hadn't thought it possible) when it became clear that the whole text was going to be peppered with unexplained French and Latin phrases, with a few snatches of other languages thrown in (at least one sentence per paragraph, it seemed). You need a basic understanding of pretty much all the romantic languages and their ancestor if you want to understand everything in the book. The book felt like listening to one of Boris Johnson's speeches; and as with Johnson's speeches, while I'm sure there are people in the world that this will appeal to, I am not one of them.
dkevanstoronto's review
4.0
The author laments that aristocrats in the post war period of Britain's long decline will be forced to do their own dishes and will not be able to live the lives of passion like they used to in the 18th century. He then proceeds to describe every crime imaginable, every shameful desire and every brutality that can horrify from that period. This was the glory days he laments. It made for pretty nasty reading and I've researched Stalin's Purges, Hitler's death camps and American racism. And yet, this shocked me. This sink pit of evil known as the Hanoverian period of English history is so fraught with everything to make one feel disgusted that this book does serve a purpose. It shows you precisely how bad it was.
Enlightenment England was a miracle not because of what it did, but because it came from the likes that T. H. White so admires. How they rose above the filth is impossible to say, but T. H. White gives you some idea of how difficult that rise must have been.
Enlightenment England was a miracle not because of what it did, but because it came from the likes that T. H. White so admires. How they rose above the filth is impossible to say, but T. H. White gives you some idea of how difficult that rise must have been.
mayhap's review
3.0
T. H. White has got hold of some excellent gossip and now he wants to dish.
All of these fantastic anecdotes were more than a century old when he wrote this book and closer by now to two, but that in no way diminishes the desire to pass them on. If anything, it lends an urgency to the enterprise: White wants everyone to know that the glitterati of the late 18th century were anything but dull, especially compared to the Romantics, whose unjust reputation for being more interesting than their predecessors comes from straitening their laces considerably and then loosening them a bit while making a big fuss about how daring they were, to hear White tell it.
Before he can get down to the serious business of gossip, he puts forward a bit of a thesis, namely, that important people should not be bothered with the washing-up, and that "the peak of British culture was reached in the latter years of George III: that the rot began to set in with the 'Romantics': that the apparent prosperity of Victoria's reign was autumnal, not vernal: and that now we are done for." If he is not at least half-jocular in his reactionary grumpery, at least he sandwiches it between two jokes and then swiftly moves on to the good stuff.
The British peerage at this time numbered slightly less than the population of my high school, except that these people had fantastic quantities of wealth, leisure, and actual power to wield (when some of them could be bothered to get out of bed). It should be unsurprising that their cliques, pranks, rivalries, etc., played out on a fabulous scale. Furthermore, they wrote and were written about extensively, leaving White the pleasing task of stringing together juicy anecdotes with scene-setting period detail and his own observations, by turns wry, indulgent, scathing and amused. It is a funny and readable book (although it is more readable if you read French, which it sometimes seems like every other person is speaking, all of it quite untranslated; and to think they told me in high school that Spanish would be more practical!).
I picked up this book with an eye towards T. H. White himself, with the subject matter a pleasing bonus, so I noted with interest what he had to say on the subjects of homosexuality and sado-masochism [his term]. The former is nearly always mentioned in the form of a syllogism: incest is to the Age of Scandal as homosexuality is to the twentieth century (once he additionally specifies the interwar period), these being the vices that disproportionately occupied their respective eras. Here he perhaps has a point, but it still seems to me a bit like a counter-accusation of wolf-crying.
With regards to the latter, he engages the subject a bit more directly: and after all, who could try to depict this era without mentioning floggings (illustrated with a period engraving, naturally) or the Marquis de Sade (who gets his own chapter, tucked at the very end, right after the one devoted to the peculiar fad for ears, the violent removal thereof, and the sad story of Princess Caroline Matilda, who was married off to the syphilitic flagellant masturbation-addict King of Denmark, had him put away in tandem with their mutual physician and her lover, and was outmaneuvered in turn by her mother-in-law and barely made it back to England intact). His take on de Sade is entertaining–he calls him "a timid and inefficient sadist" and complains that his books are not only "ridiculous nonsense" but "unnatural" for jumbling together all sorts of "perversions" that White claims are "indisputabl[y]" incompatible. Although he goes too far in the other direction (sadists are never Lesbians? Really?), I enjoy his bland refusal to be shocked as de Sade clearly wants so badly to be shocking, and his epitaph: "[De Sade]'s name, far from being forgotten, gave a substantive, adjective and adverb to every civilised language."
All of these fantastic anecdotes were more than a century old when he wrote this book and closer by now to two, but that in no way diminishes the desire to pass them on. If anything, it lends an urgency to the enterprise: White wants everyone to know that the glitterati of the late 18th century were anything but dull, especially compared to the Romantics, whose unjust reputation for being more interesting than their predecessors comes from straitening their laces considerably and then loosening them a bit while making a big fuss about how daring they were, to hear White tell it.
Before he can get down to the serious business of gossip, he puts forward a bit of a thesis, namely, that important people should not be bothered with the washing-up, and that "the peak of British culture was reached in the latter years of George III: that the rot began to set in with the 'Romantics': that the apparent prosperity of Victoria's reign was autumnal, not vernal: and that now we are done for." If he is not at least half-jocular in his reactionary grumpery, at least he sandwiches it between two jokes and then swiftly moves on to the good stuff.
The British peerage at this time numbered slightly less than the population of my high school, except that these people had fantastic quantities of wealth, leisure, and actual power to wield (when some of them could be bothered to get out of bed). It should be unsurprising that their cliques, pranks, rivalries, etc., played out on a fabulous scale. Furthermore, they wrote and were written about extensively, leaving White the pleasing task of stringing together juicy anecdotes with scene-setting period detail and his own observations, by turns wry, indulgent, scathing and amused. It is a funny and readable book (although it is more readable if you read French, which it sometimes seems like every other person is speaking, all of it quite untranslated; and to think they told me in high school that Spanish would be more practical!).
I picked up this book with an eye towards T. H. White himself, with the subject matter a pleasing bonus, so I noted with interest what he had to say on the subjects of homosexuality and sado-masochism [his term]. The former is nearly always mentioned in the form of a syllogism: incest is to the Age of Scandal as homosexuality is to the twentieth century (once he additionally specifies the interwar period), these being the vices that disproportionately occupied their respective eras. Here he perhaps has a point, but it still seems to me a bit like a counter-accusation of wolf-crying.
With regards to the latter, he engages the subject a bit more directly: and after all, who could try to depict this era without mentioning floggings (illustrated with a period engraving, naturally) or the Marquis de Sade (who gets his own chapter, tucked at the very end, right after the one devoted to the peculiar fad for ears, the violent removal thereof, and the sad story of Princess Caroline Matilda, who was married off to the syphilitic flagellant masturbation-addict King of Denmark, had him put away in tandem with their mutual physician and her lover, and was outmaneuvered in turn by her mother-in-law and barely made it back to England intact). His take on de Sade is entertaining–he calls him "a timid and inefficient sadist" and complains that his books are not only "ridiculous nonsense" but "unnatural" for jumbling together all sorts of "perversions" that White claims are "indisputabl[y]" incompatible. Although he goes too far in the other direction (sadists are never Lesbians? Really?), I enjoy his bland refusal to be shocked as de Sade clearly wants so badly to be shocking, and his epitaph: "[De Sade]'s name, far from being forgotten, gave a substantive, adjective and adverb to every civilised language."
smcleish's review
3.0
Originally published on my blog here in August 2007.
T.H. White is obviously best known for his Arthur stories, starting with [b:The Sword in the Stone|316845|The Sword in the Stone (The Once and Future King, #1)|T.H. White|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1355212194s/316845.jpg|2457438], and after that, for his book on falconry, [b:The Goshawk|1188127|The Goshawk|T.H. White|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320461488s/1188127.jpg|105249]. So a guess as to which period he would choose as the subject for a series of essays on history would probably be medieval. Instead, The Age of Scandal is about England in the second half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, roughly the reigns of George III and George IV. The book chronicles the scandals of the age (with a chapter on the [a:Marquis de Sade|2885224|Marquis de Sade|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1315315272p2/2885224.jpg] taking it across the Channel), and is really a minimal narrative thread connecting excerpts from contemporary letters and diaries.
That White had views which now seem a little eccentric is evident from the very first sentence: "Well, we have lived to see the end of civilization in England." (Those who read the table of contents before this statement would have realised his eccentricity from the inclusion of an essay entitled Ears.) He believed that the essence of civilisation in England was the country house aristocratic culture that was effectively destroyed by changes in the property laws during the first half of the twentieth century - something which may have made this start seem less outrageous to a committed Tory at the end of Labour's first post-war government. It does seem that the rest of the book is devoted to prove something quite different: that there was nothing civilised about the late eighteenth century either.
On the other hand, he may well not have intended this to be taken seriously. Among his other suggestions that must surely be tongue in cheek is the suggestion that the reason that the French revolution failed to spread to England was that the English have a sense of humour. Later, White quotes an English description of King Christian VII of Denmark, which ends, "That is all that decency permits to be said, the rest must be imagined." Then, linking this to an account by a French writer who is much less discrete, he adds, "It need not be imagined, however, by people who understand French."
There are lots of interesting, amusing and enjoyable quoted documents in The Age of Scandal. It is not the place to look for in depth analysis, or indeed for anything (the lack of an index makes it almost useless for reference). White also expects a knowledge of the events of the period; people and events are referred to without explanation or further mention. But if you have a passing familiarity with the personalities, reading the highlights and raciest sections of contemporary accounts of them is fascinating. The bittiness which comes from being a collection of essays is something of a problem, with events referred to without being described elsewhere when in a more unified narrative they surely would be (scandals involving the sons of George III are a case in point; despite an essay on Royal Gossip, there are other scandals mentioned elsewhere that do not appear in that section at all). But otherwise this is a most entertaining read.
T.H. White is obviously best known for his Arthur stories, starting with [b:The Sword in the Stone|316845|The Sword in the Stone (The Once and Future King, #1)|T.H. White|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1355212194s/316845.jpg|2457438], and after that, for his book on falconry, [b:The Goshawk|1188127|The Goshawk|T.H. White|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320461488s/1188127.jpg|105249]. So a guess as to which period he would choose as the subject for a series of essays on history would probably be medieval. Instead, The Age of Scandal is about England in the second half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, roughly the reigns of George III and George IV. The book chronicles the scandals of the age (with a chapter on the [a:Marquis de Sade|2885224|Marquis de Sade|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1315315272p2/2885224.jpg] taking it across the Channel), and is really a minimal narrative thread connecting excerpts from contemporary letters and diaries.
That White had views which now seem a little eccentric is evident from the very first sentence: "Well, we have lived to see the end of civilization in England." (Those who read the table of contents before this statement would have realised his eccentricity from the inclusion of an essay entitled Ears.) He believed that the essence of civilisation in England was the country house aristocratic culture that was effectively destroyed by changes in the property laws during the first half of the twentieth century - something which may have made this start seem less outrageous to a committed Tory at the end of Labour's first post-war government. It does seem that the rest of the book is devoted to prove something quite different: that there was nothing civilised about the late eighteenth century either.
On the other hand, he may well not have intended this to be taken seriously. Among his other suggestions that must surely be tongue in cheek is the suggestion that the reason that the French revolution failed to spread to England was that the English have a sense of humour. Later, White quotes an English description of King Christian VII of Denmark, which ends, "That is all that decency permits to be said, the rest must be imagined." Then, linking this to an account by a French writer who is much less discrete, he adds, "It need not be imagined, however, by people who understand French."
There are lots of interesting, amusing and enjoyable quoted documents in The Age of Scandal. It is not the place to look for in depth analysis, or indeed for anything (the lack of an index makes it almost useless for reference). White also expects a knowledge of the events of the period; people and events are referred to without explanation or further mention. But if you have a passing familiarity with the personalities, reading the highlights and raciest sections of contemporary accounts of them is fascinating. The bittiness which comes from being a collection of essays is something of a problem, with events referred to without being described elsewhere when in a more unified narrative they surely would be (scandals involving the sons of George III are a case in point; despite an essay on Royal Gossip, there are other scandals mentioned elsewhere that do not appear in that section at all). But otherwise this is a most entertaining read.
arbieroo's review
2.0
T.H. White gives us a brief tour of more-or-less Regency society that seems to have no point except to humorously repeat the most scandalous/bitchy/salacious gossip of the era and poke fun at major figures of the time, largely through extended quotations from contemporaries. In doing so he reveals perhaps more about himself than the history he's talking about in the most partial and judgemental fashion imaginable. It's not a flattering self-portrait, depicting a very conventional middle-class man of his times not really recognisable as the author of The Once and Future King. It lacks any kind of thesis but it's equal parts amusing and appalling. I just don't think White expected himself to be one of the characters we are both amused and appalled by...
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