Swagger, colour and dash

A. N. Wilson claims that he can imagine nothing more agreeable than the life of a country parson, ‘born in the 1830s with the genetic inheritance of strong teeth’. The Victorians are still vivid to him: from his 1950s childhood, he can recall the last vestiges of their way of life – gas-lit station waiting-rooms, cream jugs covered with beaded cloths – and memories of actual survivors, too. ‘When I went up to Oxford in 1969,’ he tells us in the introduction, ‘there were at least two pair of spinster sisters, the Misses Butler and Deneke, who could remember tea parties with Lewis Carroll.’ (Even though I’m five years younger than Wilson, I can cap that – Frances Partridge, still happily with us, told me that she could remember Henry James flinging her playfully into the air; and I once met a man whose gardener had been a powder-monkey at the battle of Trafalgar.)

It is this immediate, imaginative link with the 19th century which makes Wilson’s synoptic survey of the era so lively and engaging. Not one of its 620 pages of text is dull or vaporous. Wilson may not be the most subtle or elegant of stylists, but his prose is unfailingly lucid and witty. He is never pretentious, he has the gifts of clarity and wit, informed by a breadth of erudition, a quickly inflamed moral fervour and an intense sense of identification with his grandfathers’ and great-grandfathers’ generations. He went to Rugby and still worries about the absence of God. He is, in other words, more than a bit of a Victorian himself.

Yet his bravado in this undertaking has perhaps been excessive. The book doesn’t confine itself in any respect, and the result is not so much baggy as bursting at the seams. It has ‘swollen to proportions which appal its author,’ he admits in the preface.