Fat Book

AND So--VICTORIA--Vaughan Wilkins --Macmillan ($2.50).

For accuracy and ingeniousness of theory, publishers as predictors of best-sellers are about on a par with those obstetricians who attempt to predetermine the sex of their clients' babies. Because Anthony Adverse and Gone With the Wind were big novels, publishers have lately favored what might be called the Weights & Measures Theory. This week Publisher Macmillan again subscribed to this theory with the announcement that And So--Vic-toria weighed 7! Ib. in typescript, ran to over 1,600 pages in manuscript, 618 pages in print, and was going to be a successor to Gone With The Wind. Critics were not so optimistic. Some believed that the newcomer's size might be due to glandular trouble. Others thought it might choke to death on its title.

Base plot of And So--Victoria revolves around the attempts of the Duke of Cumberland to prevent Queen Victoria from coming to the English throne. Supporting villains are the whole House of Hanover, blacker than the ink that tells about them. Hero of the story, an Anthony Adverse type of character, is Christopher Harnish, whose sinister connection with Hanoverian royalty is first dangled before the reader on page 112, when it is discovered that his mother, a sister of George IV, secretly married her brother's illegitimate son.

At the age of nine Christopher is accused of trying to assassinate the infant Princess Victoria. The real gunmen are two Cumberland spies, one of them Christopher's father. Christopher runs away, is found by a peasant who sells him to a cotton manufacturer. Enroute to North England in the company of workhouse children, he falls in love with a slum girl, is involved in a murder and sentenced to be hanged. The good uncle who saves him is an old lover of his dead mother. Viscount Setoun, who sends him to school, gives him an Austrian estate. Christopher's fairy godmother teams up with the Viscount. When an aggressive American schoolgirl tries to seduce Christopher, they send him to Germany.

While a German guardsman, Christopher learns for the first time that his mother was a princess. After that he cannot turn around without hearing about the dirty Hanovers. An actress who takes a fancy to him turns out to be his first love, the slum girl. But when he wants to marry her, she turns him away with a story about her past that is almost as bad as the ones he has been hearing about his Hanoverian relatives. Breaking point of his German adventures is when he sees how an old baron avenges the seduction of his niece and her daughter by a lecherous nobleman. Covering the lovers with a pistol, the baron reads Old Testament verse, orders the lecher to undress his mistress, then slits his eyeballs.

Back in England after a trip around the world, with a stopover in the U. S., Christopher poses as one of the Cumberland conspirators to worm his way into their headquarters in a remote Welsh castle. There unexpectedly he meets the Duke of Cumberland, a fiendish Frenchwoman who turns out to be his grandmother, and his father, who finally divulges the facts about Christopher's parentage, which "is both better and worse than the reader thought. In chains after making mincemeat of two burly guards, dreamy six-foot Christopher defies his captors to do their worst, says he means to guarantee Victoria's accession to the throne. Having made good many pages later, Christopher asks nothing in return except a royal document canceling his actress friend's unsavory beginnings as a prostitute's daughter.

The Author-In Palestine during the World War, Vaughan Wilkins, son of a slum parson, lived in a dugout reputed to have been shared by Samson & Delilah. And So--Victoria, his first novel, was written in his father-in-law's historic house in Wales, in a London house once occupied by Samuel Pepys, on a freighter during a bad storm, and in Goliad, Texas, where relatives live. At 23 the editor of a London tabloid, he retired from newspaper work after blowing up as assistant editor of Lord Beaverbrook's London Daily Express. A great-grandfather designed London's National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, hobnobbed with the Duke of Wellington and the famed painters and authors of that day. Mr. Wilkins especially likes Southerners' drip coffee and their accent.

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