Judith Flanders

The rise of the ‘misery memoir’ describing abusive childhoods, followed by the I-was-a-teenage-druggie-alkie-gangbanger-tick-as-appropriate memoir, pushed into the shadows an older tradition, the memoir of childhood pleasure, of charm and humour. Some of the greats — Gwen Raverat’s Period Piece, Diana Holman-Hunt’s My Grandmothers and I — continue to be enjoyed; others every bit as good — Joan Wyndham’s Love Lessons trilogy — must be snapped up secondhand. Marjorie Ann Watt’s Slideshow never quite reaches these heights, but is nevertheless a welcome addition to this genre. Watts herself is a painter and illustrator, and here she uses words to depict the lost world of the prewar bohemian Hampstead upper-middle-classes.

Of the making of books about the Pre-Raphaelites, it appears, there is no end. Like the Bloomsberries, most of the PRB are more interesting to read about than the study of their work would suggest: a few towering talents stalk the mountaintops, while many lesser ones lurk in valleys and foothills. George Boyce was one of those lesser talents — a watercolourist of some small fame among his colleagues (although he was 52 before he was elected to full membership of the Old Water-Colour Society). His friend Henry Tanworth Wells had more worldly recognition, if not the esteem of the avant-garde: as a portraitist he painted the great, the good, the socially eminent or the just plain rich. The two men were also connected through a third painter, Boyce’s sister Joanna.

The actor-biographer Simon Callow has played Dickens, and has created Dickensian characters, in monologues and in a solo bravura rendition of A Christmas Carol. Now he suggests that the theatricality of Dickens’s own life is a subject worthy of exploration in book form. So it is, and if Callow had done so, it might have made a useful addition to what he rightly identifies as the ‘tsuanami’ of books that are appearing for Dickens’ bicentennial. But in this cursory biography, he merely makes token gestures in that direction: we learn rather a lot about Charles Mathews’ one-man shows; and Callow describes the theatrical impulses behind some of the novels.

Carola Hicks was an acclaimed art historian, and, as she phrased it, a biographer of objects, exploring the ‘lives’ of art-historical subjects from the Bayeux tapestry to the stained-glass windows of King’s College Chapel, and now Jan van Eyck’s ‘Arnolfini Wedding Portrait’, deftly weaving together the history of the times in which the objects were created, art-historical analysis and a study of their afterlife, both how the pieces were treated by successive generations and what the cultural resonances of those treatments might tell us today.

‘La justice flétrit, la prison corrompt et la société a les criminels qu’elle mérite’ — Justice withers, prison corrupts, and society gets the criminals it deserves. ‘La justice flétrit, la prison corrompt et la société a les criminels qu’elle mérite’ — Justice withers, prison corrupts, and society gets the criminals it deserves. With that terrifying and depressing thought, the fin-de- siècle criminologist Jean-Alexandre-Eugène Lacassagne summed up his views at the end of his long career.

There’s nothing like a really good wallow in nostalgia. There’s nothing like a really good wallow in nostalgia. And if it can be arranged so that the nostalgia is for a time that never was, that’s even better. So it is hardly surprising that when, after the horrors of the first world war, Princess Marie Louise, Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, approached Sir Edwin Lutyens to design a dolls’ house for Queen Mary, they settled stylistically on creating a house firmly rooted in that semi- mythical long Edwardian pre-war summer, when God was clearly an Englishman, his home was his (miniature) castle, and his servants were, decently, not only omnipresent but also invisible.

One’s past life is, usually, comfortably past. One’s past life is, usually, comfortably past. Susan Morrow’s first husband, Edward, is so firmly in her past that his second wife even sends her Christmas cards, signed ‘love’. Apart from that once-a-year token, she hasn’t heard from Edward in two decades. Their early marriage had been brief, and at cross-purposes: she had wanted a conventional bourgeois life, while he wanted to write — worse, he wanted to be a writer. Now, out of her past, comes a novel from Edward, with a note saying ‘Damn! but this book is good.’ But it’s still missing something, he fears, and he asks his long-ex-wife to read it, and tell him what.

Angela Thirlwell’s previous book was a double biography of William Rossetti (brother to the more famous Dante Gabriel) and his wife Lucy (daughter of the more famous Ford Madox Brown). Angela Thirlwell’s previous book was a double biography of William Rossetti (brother to the more famous Dante Gabriel) and his wife Lucy (daughter of the more famous Ford Madox Brown). Now she has once again turned her attention to the margins of the Pre-Raphaelite group, with a joint portrait of the four women who influenced Ford Madox Brown: his two wives, Elisabeth and Emma, and two women for whom he had spiritual affinities, and (probably platonic) romantic yearnings. Elisabeth was, in reality, the least influential, for her life was pathetically brief.

Many attempts have been made to portray the ‘Roaring Twenties’, or the ‘Gilded Nineties’, or the something-or-other sometime-else, but in truth the 1930s is one of the few decades that fits neatly into a nice round summary, with the Great Depression at one end, the second world war at the other. Many attempts have been made to portray the ‘Roaring Twenties’, or the ‘Gilded Nineties’, or the something-or-other sometime-else, but in truth the 1930s is one of the few decades that fits neatly into a nice round summary, with the Great Depression at one end, the second world war at the other. The 1920s had seen a sharp recovery from a war in which 30 per cent of all men aged 20–24 had died.

Stranger in the House: Women’s Stories of Men Returning from the Second World War, by Julie Summers The second world war is big business. Television, film, novels — whole industries have evolved to bring home to us the images of a ‘just’ war. Then there are the thousands of books, on politics, economics, Hitler and Churchill, Rommel and Monty. Too few of these, however, give us authentic voices, telling their own stories. Further, most end with VE or VJ Day, with happy crowds dancing down the Mall. But what came after? How did families reconnect after six years of separation, privation, horror and fear?