Splendid Occasions in English History : 1510-1947. By Ifan Kyrle
Fletcher. (Cassell.
635.) •
ONE had feared that in these straitened limes no one could any longer be found to produce what the Germans call a Tisch- Buch, a " table-book," a luxuriously bound, lavishly illustrated but not perhaps strictly necessary volume, a book to look at spas- Inodically rather than to read deliberately, the sort of thing that lay on the centre-table of a Victorian library—on a velvet cloth with hanging bobbles that nearly touched the ground—and was employed, with vary- ing success, to keep the children amused on wet afternoons. It is therefore a delightful pleasure to find that Mr. Ifan Kyrle Fletcher and Messrs. Cassell have now pro- duced, in 1951, something that does approximate to a Tisch-Buch—and not a word of the foregoing sentence should be construed as being in the remotest degree critical of one of the most handsome and thoroughly enjoyable volumes that have been published for years. The anthor begins with the Field of the Cloth of Gold and continues by way of the progresses of Queen Elizabeth, the wedding in 1613 of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Frederick, the Restora- tion, Coronation and wedding of Charles II, the creation of the Order of the Bath, the Shakespeare Jubilee at Stfatford in 1769, the Coronation of George IV, the funerals
of Nelson and Wellington, Louis-Philippe's visit to Queen Victoria, the opening of the Great Exhibition, and the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Princess Alexandra, until he concludes with the wedding of Princess Elizabeth in 1947. The twelve colour and sixty-six monochrome reproduc- tions have been very well chosen and will be interesting and unfamiliar to most people the colour plates of Queen Eliza- beth being carried in a procession, of the restoration of Charles II, of George IV and his train-bearers, of the Shakespeare jubilee of 1769, and of Nelson's and Wellington's funerals—the work for the most part of little-known or unidentified artists—are genuinely exciting ; and Queen Victoria's sketch of Wellington's funeral car would not have disgraced a professional. Mr. Kyrle Fletcher's accomplished text provides an appropriate commentary throughout. There is, it must be confessed, a slight feelin4 of anti-climax about the final pages, in which, after so much richness, Princess Elizabeth's wedding is represented by two • rather commonplace photographs and a design for the wedding dress by Norman Hartnell. But the book as a whole is an admirable Tisch-Buch, stoutly guarded by its card- board case and providing for those who can afford it, and for their children, a vivid impression of the pageantry of English
Previous page
