Birds Eye View

THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA (437 pp.) -Hector Bolitho -Macmillan ($5)

When Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria appeared, at the dawn of the debunking '20s, many critics deplored its un-Victorian tone and sardonic bias. Now, time has so mellowed Strachey's lese-majeste that his biography has been accepted both as a classic study of Victorianism and a human portrait of the great Queen.

This new biography of Victoria, which is Bolitho's ninth about this period, has nothing of Strachey's amused, amusing manner, nothing of his skepticism and silky grace. Above all, it does not contain a single sentence that even runs a risk of being thought dangerously brilliant. All present or accounted for are the famous, fascinating figures of the great era--Baron Stockmar, Lord Melbourne, Lord Palmerston, Mr. Gladstone, Disraeli, the Duke of Wellington, et al.--and so frigidly correct that they appear to have been hewn from frozen blocks of Birds Eye.

Author Bolitho's reason for doing more amply what Strachey has already done more economically is the emergence of fresh material--among others, hitherto unpublished letters from Prince Consort Albert to his German tutor, letters from the Queen to her daughter the Empress of Germany, tappings from such virgin sources as the late Queen Marie of Rumania, certain aged members of Victoria's court and the 19th Century files of the Hartford (Conn.) Times and Courant. Hardly enough to justify a new and inferior biography.

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