Queenly Biographer
Agnes Strickland. By Dame Una Pope-Hennessy. (Chatto and Windus. 16s.)
SIR WALTER Scow, with his tales that could be regarded as fiction founded upon fact, opened a pis aller for the serious- minded readers of his day. To Miss Agnes Strickland (born in 1796) countless modern readers who have thought them- selves above the novel, historical or otherwise, owe a similar debt, but this time it is by way of works which may be described as fact founded upon fiction.
If such a description seems unfair to a largely respectable body of biographers, turn to Chapter VI of Dame Una's enter- taining book and find there (reproduced by permission of our present King) Queen Victoria's pencilled notes, made in 1840 before her hand was used to her wedding-ring, on the margins of Miss Strickland's up-to-the-minute biography : "Victoria from her birth to her Bridal." Sometimes the royal bio- graphee has reversed a statement merely by inserting the word "not." More often her comments are " never ! " "not true ! " or " false ! " It is this last which she appends to Miss Strickland's remark that the Prince Consort was "an accomplished wooer." Victoria, it would seem, knew better.
This is not to say that Miss Strickland was not in general a worthy biographer. It is merely by way of reminder of how Mr. Lytton Strachey and even Plutarch might fare had these been exposed to contemporary marginal fire by their subjects. Miss Strickland was, Dame Una assures us, "a thoroughly conscientious historian" whose motto was "Facts not Opinions." In the catchpenny account which fell under Victoria's searchlight she displayed merely her aptitude for journalism, and relied, to her chagrin, upon information hur- riedly proffered by her publisher. For her dead queens, upon whom her fame rests—thirty-three of them in twelve volumes —she worked on principle as well as by compulsion only from original documents, and she grudged no trouble in the then stupendous task of access to sources.
Her own grand claim to be "ancestrally connected with Queen Katharine Parr" on one side and to " derive her descent" on the other from no less than eight queens of the Lancastrian House, was not strong in fact. It failed of elicit- ing calls from the County, even to a manor house that was as large and as genteel as the Strickland family who lived in it, gloating over tide-deeds that dated from the reign of Edward VI. All the more it "nerved Agnes Strickland to work as if she were an appointed interpretet of the past, someone with a quite special faculty of understanding dead queens and their ways of life." Thus it was with her ardent eyes fixed upon her imagined progenitors that she founded, almost without knowing it, the new highly readable bio- graphical school to which we owe much.
In her lifetime she was a household name and her " Queens " were furniture necessary to the well-bred library. Dame Una, whose father was Miss Stricldand's godson, was brought up on them. Her account of Agnes is first-hand, generous yet sub-acid, finely informed. Agnes was not a great writer. She was a great snob. For anything outside worldly grandeur she had no sensitiveness. We are shocked by her comments upon poor John Clare after a call at his asylum. Moreover, only fourteen of "The Queens" were in fact her work, nineteen being by her sister, Eliza, a better writer and scholar than herself. Yet she is shown to deserve her stately niche, and no more than Eliza can we wish to dislodge her from it All resplendent, she went to the parties and functions in London and Paris while Eliza stayed away. She tackled publishers at a time when Hallam was a losing proposition. She conceived a grandiose scheme, carried it out with grandiosity, and took all the blame as well as all the praise.
Incidentally, the only reader of "The Queens" to detect two hands at work was Queen Victoria, to the social history of whose times Dame Una makes a valuable contribution with
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