Matthew Dennison (1)

I did like Wind in the Willows as a kid. I liked parts of it still as an adult (maybe it was partly the illustrations by Ernest Shepard or Arthur Rackham - take your pick - that charmed me so). So Matthew Dennison's more-or-less graceful and more-or-less sympathetic biography of Kenneth Grahame caught my eye, as I knew basically nothing about this author of a classic novel for children. Spoiler alert: I don't think I'd want to be in the room with him. His childhood - a time and a state of mind he clung to with pathological intensity - was a very mixed bag indeed. Mother dead of scarlet fever when he was five, and Dad was an alcoholic. The four kids were farmed out to maternal grandmother of limited means and limited interest in raising the brood; they lived in a falling-apart house in the country. But that became the golden era of Grahame's unending love for the river and countryside as depicted in his stories. But then Dad decided he wanted the kids back, so back they went, and when he fell apart too, they were shipped back to grandma. Of an imaginative and literary bent, Grahame desperately wanted to go to Oxford, but there was no money. An uncle got him a clerk's job at the Bank of England instead, where he spent his working life, writing essays and stories on the side. He valorized the perfections of children and childhood, of a sunlit and perfectly contented rural life, no modernization or grownups tolerated, living a bachelor existence where long rambles in the country with various male friends were the pinnacle of happiness.

As he neared forty, a pretty spinster regaled him with adoring verses, and he kind of, well, went along with it. It was just what people did. He kept away from her with long visits elsewhere, but they wrote each other truly nauseating letters written in some sort of Cockney baby-talk with phonetic spellings. Finally, her attentions were compromising enough that he caved and they married. By the time to honeymoon was over, so was the relationship - but she was pregnant. A premature baby boy, blind in one eye, came along, plunging it into disaster. Mama believed he was God's gift to the universe, and he grew up believing it too, a volatile, even violent boy. The boy was frequently shunted off for weeks-long trips to the seaside with a nurse while his parents resided in separate parts of the house. Grahame wrote letters to him, stories of mole and rat and badger and the river and the sea, with the riotous, selfish, irresponsible and unbearable Mr. Toad based on the child himself.

Here I stop. It was all so creepily weird and unhealthy I didn't want to know any more, though I did learn in other sources that the wretched son lay down on the railroad tracks to be dismembered by a train when he was 20. So... my fond memories of a charming childhood story were rather trashed by the discovery of the misery from which it grew. Grahame also put me in mind of two other roughly contemporary writing men, J.M. Barrie and Charles Dodgson - purveyors of classic literature for kids, and all of whom retained obsessions about children, about remaining children themselves, and none of them very healthy adult men. Dickens, too - a champion of children (Copperfield, Twist, Jo...) whose actual kids couldn't stand him. What a weird era, for all the wonderful art and literature it fostered. I kinda wish I hadn't even picked this book up.… (mehr)

Any serious book which extends wider knowledge of Queen Caroline, consort of George II, is welcome. This work is good in parts. I would pick out as the strengths the earlier parts of the book, dealing with Caroline's childhood and then the period after marriage before her husband became king.

The section from 1727 to 1737 is much weaker, being episodic and pretty lightweight on the political side (eg interactions with Walpole). It is also not very detailed about relations with Caroline's eldest son Frederick, and the end section is very abrupt. However a good picture is given overall of Caroline's marriage and her ambivalent relationship with her boorish husband.

More trivial matters - the title is ill-chosen, and an editor really ought to have cut back the author's obsessive references to Caroline's bosom. But the epilogue is touching.… (mehr)