And So--Victoria
by
[Macmillan, $2.50]
IT is not without a certain reluctance that one finds oneself unable to give unstinted praise to so long and so earnestly written a book as Vaughan Wilkins’s And So— Victoria. The author has obviously done considerable reading in the memoirs of the period and has made wise use of such incidents as that described in The Creevey Papers where the aging King William IV, dozing during a conversation, awakes from time to time to mutter, ‘Exactly so,’and then goes to sleep again.The Greville Memoirs, too, supply him — among other things — with the fact that the king had a head shaped ‘like a pineapple.’ On the whole we get a clear and quite vivid picture, drawn from the best contemporary sources, of the dissolute Georgian period and its main historical figures.
It is when he creates characters of his own that Mr. Wilkins is less satisfactory. He has, it is clear, read Dickens as well as the memoirs of the period, and, like Dickens, he is fond of grotesque characters. In fact, with the exception of a few of the leading figures, —• people who are to be taken seriously by the reader, — there is hardly anyone in the book who is not grotesque. Unfortunately, however, it seems to be the letter rather than the spirit of Dickens’s art which the author has captured, and we become conscious of a lack of selectivity and a repetition which we do not find in the works of the older author. While an extremely long thin nose as a label by which we are to identify a character is undoubtedly a legitimate, not to say a highly effective device, when half-adozen characters appear with just such a long thin nose the result is apt to be confusing. The same might be said of protruding teeth and certain other physical traits which, while entertaining enough in isolated instances, tend to lose force with repetition.
It would hardly be fair either to the publishers or to the prospective reader to give a detailed résumé of And So— Victoria. It will perhaps be sufficient to say that, being an historical novel, it has to do with plots against the royal house, stolen papers, duels, revenge, and the other standard attributes of this particular type of fiction. The early part of the book is a description, reminiscent of the difficulties encountered by David Copperfield, Little Nell, and others, of the wanderings of the boy, Christopher Harnish, and his escapes from various unpleasant grownups, all of whom are fully equipped with protruding teeth, leers, and, in one instance, with a steel hook in place of a hand. In this period of his life there is a good deal of beating, some rape, and a murder, and Christopher longs, quite understandably, to return to ‘the world where silver tinkled against old china in rooms that smelled of lavender.’
Eventually he does, and is taken under the wing of Queen Caroline upon her return to England. From then on, although there are appropriate moments of suspense, his fortunes are on the upgrade until, when the book ends, he is able, practically single-handed, to foil a plot against the future queen: And so — Victoria. . . .
While one hardly expects in a novel of action of this sort any great subtlety of characterization, it is surely desirable that the more important characters — especially the hero — be presented in such a way that the reader shall be at least mildly concerned about their fate. In this respect And So— Victoria is most disappointing, for one seldom feels that it makes a great deal of difference one way or the other whether Christopher Harnish succeeds or fails, lives or dies.
Christopher never ceases dreaming about silver tinkling against old china, — indeed, there is a great deal of highly emotional, if vague, speculation about dreams throughout the book, — and while we are definitely told, as the story draws to a close, that he is at last growing up, we are never really fully convinced of the fact. There is something rather tiresome about his sensitiveness, especially in his relations with women, toward whom his reactions seem to be almost pathologically virginal; and no amount of gunplay and hairbreadth escapes quite serves to dispel the impression that we are face to face, not with a delicate and sensitive nature, but with somewhat of a prig.
BENEDICT THIELEN