Celebrities & Shims

VICTORIA OF ENGLAND--Edith Sitwell--Houghton Mifflin ($3.50).

Since Lytton Strachey published his Queen Victoria 15 years ago, that classic portrait of a just and virtuous monarch, first Empress of India, devoted wife and inconsolable widow, has scarcely been challenged by biographers. Readers might feel that Strachey had not told them all that was to be said about Victoria, but they were likely to be convinced, upon finishing his book, that he had told them about all they wanted to hear. In the shadow of that disadvantage Edith Sitwell last week offered a balanced, well-rounded-study of the Queen that included little new information about her, much expert writing on the sedate life of her times. A pleasant book in its own right, Victoria of England might be judged brilliant if Lytton Strachey had not paved the way for it. and might be considered a more important contribution to biography if its derivations were less plain."

Not the least remarkable feature of the volume was that Edith Sitwell should have written it. The oldest member of an industrious literary family that includes Osbert (Before the Bombardment, Miracle on Sinai) and Sacheverell (Doctor Donne and Gargantua, All Slimmer in a Day), she has previously been best known for her calm, highbrow aloofness, her volumes of verse, her idiosyncratic individualism, her interest in famed British eccentrics, her biography of Alexander Pope. Now 49, she is tall (over 6 ft.), blonde, unmarried, with straight classic features. Readers who know her previous books will be surprised at the interest in social conditions revealed in Victoria of England and at Author Sitwell's sympathy for the sufferings and struggles of the poor. Together with the artful sketches of the celebrities around the Queen, chapters illuminating the social background form the chief distinction of Victoria of England, throwing light on a side of the sovereign's career that Lytton Strachey neglected.

The celebrities are numerous and strange. They include the Duke of Kent, Victoria's father; her beloved governess, the Baroness Lehzen; the Duke of Clarence, afterwards King William; Lord Melbourne, whose wife had been Caroline Lamb, Byron's widely-publicized mistress; King Leopold of Belgium, who thought he could control England through his influence with Victoria and the Prince Consort; Palmerston, Disraeli, Gladstone, Tennyson, George IV.

When 7-year-old Victoria first met George, the King had changed greatly from the wild, handsome Prince of Wales who raised hell at Brighton, committed bigamy, piled up huge debts (TIME, Aug. 19). Now he had dropsy and "his belly," in the words of his contemporaries, "now reaches his knees." When George died new King William could scarcely conceal his delight. Since not many people knew William by sight, crowds were much astonished, before they heard of George's death, at the spectacle of William " 'an elderly gentleman with a long piece of black crape flowing from the crown of his white hat, whirling through the streets in his carriage, and grinning and bowing to all and sundry.' " The new King hated Victoria's mother. He thought she might at least wait until he died before she embarked on "royal progresses'' with Victoria and acted like a ruler. Before a hundred guests, at a banquet in honor of his birthday, he denounced her, saying that she was surrounded by evil advisers, was insulting and "incompetent to act with propriety" in the station in which she had been placed. This may have been true. Victoria's widowed mother had "grown more fond of Sir John Conroy than her position and his marriage rendered desirable ; there were affectionate passages between them, and one day Princess Victoria interrupted a scene of the kind." Thereafter her mother had little influence with her.

Fishiest character of all was Lord Melbourne, who became the first of the young Queen's great advisers. Author Sitwell's sketch of him is a masterpiece. "That odd, personally charming, whimsical benighted, and heartless yet sentimental man--heartless because he feared his own sentimentality, sentimental because he knew his heart was dead, or, perhaps, had never been born--this mixture of contradictions" had been the almost "unpleasantly tolerant" husband of rattle-brained Caroline Lamb during the great days of her affair with Byron. While his wife had been loudly confessing her passion, he had amused himself reading a book called Observations upon the Jewish Errors with respect to the Conversion of Mary Magdalene. He befriended the radical Godwin, introduced the Socialist Robert Owen to Victoria, wept easily, but was chiefly responsible for the savage punishments meted out after the Agricultural Riots of 1830 and the frightful sentences of the Tolpuddle martyrs. (They got seven years imprisonment in the penal settlements for demanding a raise of a shilling a week.)

For all her irony and her delight in the hypocrisies of the time, Edith Sitwell flinches at the descriptions of Victorian slums in Friedrich Engels' Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, at the description of Victorian penal colonies in Owen Rattenbury's Flame of Freedom. She quotes judiciously from both books. "Perhaps," she concludes, "the Victorian age was right in its belief in an inexorable and eternal hell," declares that despite her pity for suffering she can sometimes believe in it. But the hell she imagines was built for the righteous creators of the penal colonies, and she says there are times when she can imagine "dear, good, kind, whimsical" Lord Melbourne, cynically entertaining the Queen with anecdotes that were "almost episcopal in their propriety," wearing a devil's mask and bearing a devil's grin.

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