Unsparing, frivolous candour

Charles Greville? you may wonder. ‘Who he? — Ed.’ Ed, decently enough, supplies us with the answer. Greville was an idler, a gambler, a political spectator, a cold fish, and a toff’s toff: a political diarist with Alan Clark’s sharpness if not his ambition, who lived from 1794-1865, and wrote from 1814-1860.

Greville had a ringside seat for the Reform Bill, a more than nodding acquaintance with Disraeli, Lord John Russell, Louis Napoleon, and all the English monarchs of his age. He barely noticed the Peterloo massacre, was anxious about Catholic emancipation and the French revolution, was able to see both sides of the slavery issue, and lost, without much apparent regret, a favourite nephew in the Crimean war. He was cynical about pretty much everything, including — his saving grace — himself.

Edward and Diana Pearce’s new edition, which bills him as ‘the greatest English diarist after Samuel Pepys’, puts him back into print, condensing the nearly two million words of the diaries (published in seven volumes in 1938) into a single book. It is non-scholarly, with spelling regularised according to the editors’ preference and learned apparatus omitted in the interests of a ‘straight read’. Good. The introduction is brisk and valuable. The editorial apparatus is spare, affectionate and quietly humorous, with succinct page headings picking out points of interest for the browser: ‘Rioting slaves: fire on or bayonet them?’; ‘Rotten potatoes have done it’; ‘Always vote against the Jew’; ‘Indecency with a policeman’.

Notes at the back of the book help explain the historical context; a shade too scantily, in most cases, for an ignoramus such as myself, but what’s there is better than nothing at all. Brief explanations of names dropped, or sly editorial observations, appear square-bracketed in the text. A mention of ‘Morny’ (sic) is glossed: ‘[Louis Napoleon’s illegitimate half-brother, one-time Minister of the Interior and inspirer of the cheese sauce]’.