A.N. Wilson

This is a brave and learned book. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the history of Africa; who has taken sides in the recent quarrel about ‘Rhodes Must Fall’, in Oxford or other parts of the world; or who wants to entrench themselves in contrary positions in our apparent ‘culture wars’. It is the biography of a vicar’s son, born in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire in 1853, who went as a teenager to Africa to join his elder brother who’d bought a plot of land in Natal. One day, walking past a stream by the side of a field, he noticed some pebbles gleaming especially brightly. They were diamonds. By the time Cecil Rhodes enrolled as an undergraduate at Oriel College, Oxford, aged 20, he had an annual income of £23,000 – the equivalent of about £1.

Generalisations about national characteristics are open to question. Nevertheless, the overwhelming impression one gets from reading the major works of English literature, or from studying the famous English men and women of politics, the military or the academic world, is that the English have not been an especially religious lot. Or, if you think that a strange judgment of a nation that produced the finest Gothic cathedrals in Europe and the hymns of Charles Wesley, then you could rephrase it and say that they have not generally worn their religious feelings on their sleeve. Jane Austen’s hilarious novels do not quite prepare us for her letters in which she confesses her sympathy for evangelicalism.

Is Dickens’s London a place, or a state of mind, or a bit of both? I used to ask myself the question all the time when I was literary editor of this periodical and our office in Doughty Street was a few doors down from the Dickens Museum, at no. 48, the house where he lived in the early days of his fame and where his beloved sister-in-law Mary Hogarth died. The deputy lit ed, Clare Asquith, and I used to walk in those days before computers to the press, which was in Saffron Hill, Clerkenwell, the scene of Fagin’s lair. We’d pass Bleeding Heart Yard, where so much of Little Dorrit takes place. Many of the streets near our office – Brownlow Street, for example – took their names from characters in Dickens’s novels. But which came first: Dickens or the place names?

Racism lies at the heart of the Victorian rewrite of the creation myth. What happened in prehistory, according to Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s representative on Earth, was that while Homo sapiens emerged from its primitive state among the other apes and lemurs, some – Europeans – developed at a faster rate. Humankind had evolved from a ‘hairy, tailed quadruped’, which was itself ‘probably derived from an ancient marsupial animal’ (Darwin). But once the human species emerged, ‘men differ more widely from one another than they do from the apes’.

Virginia Woolf admitted to her journal: ‘I haven’t that reality gift.’ Her contemporary Arnold Bennett had it in spades. He was a great novelist, as anyone who has read Riceyman’s Steps or the Clayhanger trilogy would attest. Being also the contemporary of Henry James, Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence – you might say this was one of the reasons his reputation became obscured since those glory days of English fiction – he had fierce competition. Woolf’s snobbishness about him (see her lecture on ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’) did not help matters. It was easy to be snobbish about Bennett, ‘The Man from the North’, to use the title of his first novel.

When E. Nesbit published Wet Magic in 1913 (a charming novel in which the children encounter a mermaid), she took it for granted that her young readers would immediately pick up the references to ‘Sabrina Fair’ from Milton’s Comus. Phrases from Milton were part of the language — ‘Tomorrow to fresh woods’; ‘Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven’. Milton was central to the shared experience of life itself for those who spoke English. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries Milton was inside every literate anglophone head. If Harold Bloom is to be believed, which I think he is in this respect, the English romantic movement grew out of young poets reacting to, against and with Milton.

In 2010, Adam Sisman published a masterly biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was not merely one of the best historians of his generation but also a former intelligence officer, fascinated by tricks, lies and fraud. He himself wrote a mischievous series of anonymous articles for The Spectator, purporting to emanate from the 17th-century pen of ‘Mercurius Oxoniensis’,which gave a hilarious picture of his contemporary dons at Oxford and their crazy ways. One of his funniest books was an exposé of the sinologist Sir Edmund Backhouse, a benefactor of the Bodleian Library, whom Trevor-Roper proved to have been a forger and liar on a heroic scale.

Readers of Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage will remember that its author set out to write a life of D.H. Lawrence and somehow it never got written. In the course of the story, however, we travel to many of the scenes where Lawrence lived and wrote, and a hilarious  journey it is. Emma Darwin, namesake and descendant of Charles Darwin’s wife, alludes to Dyer’s book at the end of this charming ramble round her family. It begins with a conversation with her agent. Inevitably, the agent wants her to play safe and to write a straight biographical account of the marriage of the famous Victorian biologist. This author, the present-day Emma Darwin, is resistant to the idea, and believes that there is room for a fictional account.

This passionate series of engagements with the life of St Francis will stay in my mind for a very long time — I hope forever. Ann Wroe describes it as ‘A Life in Songs’, and it does, indeed, rehearse the familiar story of the rich young merchant’s son dispossessing himself, and giving his life to Christ so wholeheartedly that not only he, but the world, was transfigured. We revisit the kissing of the leper, the preaching to the birds, the founding of the order, the call of St Clare, the mission to the Middle East to bring peace to the Crusades, the gift of the stigmata. All these familiar events are rendered in a series of verses, sometimes metrical and rhyming, sometimes free. The sequence of the sermon to the birds is especially successful: They did not stir.

Once won, rights and freedoms are taken for granted. We all find it difficult to imagine life before the Married Women’s Property Act, when everything belonging to a wife — goods, chattels, children — automatically became the sole property of her husband. Those born since the 1960s can’t really envisage what it was like for practising homosexuals in those days. By a similar token, the mind can scarcely take in the fact that in Penal times, Catholics could not buy or sell land; or that it was an imprisonable offence for Catholics to run a school. It was a legal offence to dress as a monk or a nun out of doors.