Edward-ed Out, Perhaps
Aug. 6th, 2016 06:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerRarely one to pass up a book sale, I stopped in at one at the library in my home town. Racks and tables of small paperbacks had been set up outside, but as I mulled over some of the old science fiction novels there (and in the end didn't get many of them, although some of them I already had in other editions), a biography of King Edward VII of England caught my eye. When I went inside and saw a second biography of him on the crowded tables there, that made my mind up to get both of them. I knew the general story of the turn-of-the-twentieth century king (including his long wait through the nineteenth century to become king), but thought a bit more detail and some different perspectives would be interesting.
With Philip Magnus's King Edward VII, though, there seemed plenty of detail and yet not much in the way of analysis to fit those details together. I got through the book all right, but I was interested to move on to the slimmer and slightly more recent volume of Christopher Hibbert's Edward VII: A Portrait. It did seem a bit livelier, but I did have something of a sense that this book was recycling the sources of the previous one (which had been granted access to royal archives) and the continued feeling that the long years waiting to become king, kept away from any responsibility by Queen Victoria and occupying himself with lavish living and under-the-carpet scandal, might not be that interesting at least the way they were being told.
Even with all of those thoughts, however, I did happen to take another look at an old bookmark of mine to "The Victorian Web," and there I happened on a book review of a much more recent biography. I wondered idly if I'd be able to find it at my own local library, and then, looking at the discount tables at the nearest bookstore, I saw the last copy of a biography that did have me remembering comments from the review. It took buying Jane Ridley's The Heir Apparent to figure out it really was the book I'd seen reviewed, just with a different title for its North American edition.
Starting into this third biography, things did seem different. There was background provided on Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert that gave a better sense of just why their son had been educated the way he was, and if Ridley had commented in her introduction about the difficulty of providing a narrative to the long wait of her subject's life her scheme of focusing on the numerous women involved in one way or another in "Bertie" the Prince of Wales's life did seem to fill in something that had seemed missing. I also took slight note of her addressing a sense from the previous two biographies I'd read that Bertie's first-born son, Albert Victor "Eddy," had been troublingly unintelligent to the point that his unfortunate death before Edward's reaching the throne (his second-born son wound up becoming King George V) might have been for the best; Ridley argued, offering a bit of evidence from speeches and letters, that "Eddy" might in fact have been poorly educated by a tutor skilled all the same in making himself seem his pupil's only hope. She did, all the same, get to mentioning the grand theories trying to link him to Jack the Ripper and pin an unsolved mystery on the comforting villain of power structures.
For all that the third time had proved charming, I did sort of feel as if I'd read more than enough on the subject. All the same, though, in poking a bit deeper into "The Victorian Web" I did decide to take in an e-book version of Lytton Strachey's older biography of Queen Victoria herself, subtly opinionated yet intriguing.
With Philip Magnus's King Edward VII, though, there seemed plenty of detail and yet not much in the way of analysis to fit those details together. I got through the book all right, but I was interested to move on to the slimmer and slightly more recent volume of Christopher Hibbert's Edward VII: A Portrait. It did seem a bit livelier, but I did have something of a sense that this book was recycling the sources of the previous one (which had been granted access to royal archives) and the continued feeling that the long years waiting to become king, kept away from any responsibility by Queen Victoria and occupying himself with lavish living and under-the-carpet scandal, might not be that interesting at least the way they were being told.
Even with all of those thoughts, however, I did happen to take another look at an old bookmark of mine to "The Victorian Web," and there I happened on a book review of a much more recent biography. I wondered idly if I'd be able to find it at my own local library, and then, looking at the discount tables at the nearest bookstore, I saw the last copy of a biography that did have me remembering comments from the review. It took buying Jane Ridley's The Heir Apparent to figure out it really was the book I'd seen reviewed, just with a different title for its North American edition.
Starting into this third biography, things did seem different. There was background provided on Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert that gave a better sense of just why their son had been educated the way he was, and if Ridley had commented in her introduction about the difficulty of providing a narrative to the long wait of her subject's life her scheme of focusing on the numerous women involved in one way or another in "Bertie" the Prince of Wales's life did seem to fill in something that had seemed missing. I also took slight note of her addressing a sense from the previous two biographies I'd read that Bertie's first-born son, Albert Victor "Eddy," had been troublingly unintelligent to the point that his unfortunate death before Edward's reaching the throne (his second-born son wound up becoming King George V) might have been for the best; Ridley argued, offering a bit of evidence from speeches and letters, that "Eddy" might in fact have been poorly educated by a tutor skilled all the same in making himself seem his pupil's only hope. She did, all the same, get to mentioning the grand theories trying to link him to Jack the Ripper and pin an unsolved mystery on the comforting villain of power structures.
For all that the third time had proved charming, I did sort of feel as if I'd read more than enough on the subject. All the same, though, in poking a bit deeper into "The Victorian Web" I did decide to take in an e-book version of Lytton Strachey's older biography of Queen Victoria herself, subtly opinionated yet intriguing.